I really don’t understand those who have problems with Discourse. Even as someone who doesn’t like change in general, I never disliked it, even at first when I was just getting used to it. But now that I’ve been acclimatized, I really like many of its features and overall I think it’s much better than the version of vB we had even when it was working, which as we all know it often was not. The designers seem to have worked hard to create a modern message board, and I think they mostly succeeded. Overall, I’m very happy with it and certainly would never go back.
I’ll say that while I appreciate the fact it’s being actively maintained, I do NOT appreciate having to upgrade browsers solely because Discourse (and only Discourse) refuses to work with the older one, especially when the “upgraded” browser is inferior to the previous one or actually has broken functionality.
Initially I found it rather odd that some of the Discourse design philosophy was quite at odds with the SDMB philosophy, but it turns out that it’s sufficiently customizable that “features” that TBTB don’t like are easily disabled.
Just remembered something I hate about Discourse: It seriously fucks with your browser history, to the point that it essentially removes that feature from your browser. At least, nothing useful can be gleaned from it with the avalanche of discourse entries crowding everything else out.
It took me a while to futz with the settings and get the UI experience more to my liking, but while I don’t like it the way I liked vBulletin, I don’t hate it.
I agree with previous comments that there’s way too much white space. I’d add that the fonts are too damn big for thread titles.
The search capability used to suck something awful. You’d attempt to put in that you wanted threads “since 1/1/2013” and it would utterly mangle your attempt to type in that date and turn it into 13/12/0131 or something of that ilk and you’d have to move your cursor to the other place where it is rendering your search into Discourse Machine Language or whatever and change the misbegotten date to what you wanted it to be. But someone fixed that, fortunately.
You still can’t sort ascending. Whatever date range you search, you have to start with the most recent and klank your way backwards.
Our custom smilies are missing in action. Some of the formatting options we had under vBulletin aren’t available.
Posts aren’t numbered within threads. I hate that.
On the other hand, we’re allowed to put URLs to images and have them render inline. Not because vBulletin can’t or couldn’t do that, but because the moderators turned it off eons ago. There were reasons. Maybe performance reasons, which would have been legitimate. But it’s nice to have that back instead of having to post a link for people to click on.
No one seems to be abusing it and fetching awful imagery to disturb the community. No goatse.cs or two girls one bucket etc. But that’s not really a Discourse advantage, it’s a policy change.
Agreed. A dynamic floating reference doesn’t cut it. And it’s not like there isn’t room for it, since the top left has to be tall enough to display an avatar. You could easily fit post number in the top right and then absolute date (none of this relative crap) including time on a second line. Or vice versa; order doesn’t matter.
One thing that’s way more annoying on discourse because of this that I actually do is reading season long TV show threads when binging a season after it airs. The entire thread is there, but finding the breakpoint between each episode is much more difficult in discourse than it was in vBulletin.
I don’t recall how that was better or worse on vB, but what I appreciate is when someone posts “NEW EPISODE STARTING NOW” or something to that effect. Anyone can continue discussing previous episodes, but if you’re not caught up, it’s nice to have an obvious stopping point until you watch the next episode.
Especially in shows with lots of moving parts, cough cough Better Call Saul cough, where it’s not always obvious that people are talking about something just happened as opposed to something you missed in a previous episode. I usually end up reading the first few posts before realizing it.
On the old boards a full date and time stamp was at the top of every post. So you could figure out (either in your head or by checking IMDb) the exact date and time the next episode would start airing, then check for that before reading each post.
What I would do is identify the next episode’s date and time and then carefully scroll down before reading to find the post number of the first post after that time. Then I would know what post number I could read up to, easy peasy. This was particularly nice for shows where there was a lot of conversation the day of a new episode but early in the day before it actually aired, so you’d need to be checking timestamps.
Every step of that is much harder in discourse, including the final one of keeping track of what post number I’m currently reading.
I agree, too, but I have strong preferences for conservative use of space, minimal wasted white space, and fonts no larger than necessary. I fully understand that white space is very important to both readability and aesthetics, but there is such a thing as too much.
Coincidentally, the new Windows Firefox browser that Discourse forced me upgrade to – for no known reason related to any new functionality – has exactly that white space problem with the “Current” bookmarks dropdown. The entries are separated farther than they were before (and oddly, regular bookmark lists are still the same). Apparently some developer thought it looked prettier that way. Well, yeah, except now the full list doesn’t fit on the screen. I tend to keep my most frequently used bookmarks either at the top or at the bottom so they’re easy to find, and now I have to scroll between them.
Oh, and the new Firefox browser on my tablet that Discourse also forced an upgrade to – lots of important functions no longer work (like videos on CNN) and Discourse continuously comes up in “mobile” mode unless I keep overriding it. Didn’t have any of those problems before the “upgrades”.
If I’m looking at a recent post, and the timestamp is relevant to me, it’s because I’m asking myself questions like “Was that before or after I went out for dinner at 1:30?”, or “Was that before or after I left for church this morning at 8:40?”. In order to answer those questions, I now have to check the current time and do the mental math. I wouldn’t have to do the math for questions like “Was that more or less than two hours ago?”, but I can’t think of any situation, whatsoever, where that’s the question I’d be asking.
Where by “the first time”, you mean “the first time a tab opens”? Which is every single thread? Just now, to open this thread, I had to wait so long that my computer started to go to sleep. Sometimes, other tabs are done loading by the time I’m finished with the tab I’m on, but not always, and I can’t solve the problem by just opening more tabs at once, because at more than four tabs, everything just barfs.
From my point of view, having to wait five or ten minutes to open a new thread is basically functionally equivalent to a five or ten minute crash.
Now, I’m sure that the Horrible Coder would insist that this is just because I have an old computer. And he’s not wrong… but that’s not an excuse. The requirements for a webpage should be determined by its content. The content here is, mostly, just plain text. A well-designed message board should run just fine on Lynx. Sure, it might have some fancy features that don’t work on Lynx, so it’s fine to recommend a top-of-the-line system to get all the fancy features, but the core functionality, which is just text, should be able to work on anything that can handle text.
I’m going to disagree, modern web design doesn’t call for constraining basic web development for machines that are extremely old and under powered. What you are describing is a computer that can’t run a basic modern web application and that is no more on the developer than it is for someone who writes a program with expected system specifications equivalent to the “average” of the current market, and then someone gets it running on a 13 year old Win 7 machine and complains it doesn’t run well.
Just to elaborate a bit, a common metric for page performance is Google’s PageSpeed, which you can view the analysis of the desktop version of this very page here:
It scores a 98 out of 100 on performance. That isn’t to say the site has zero problems, it actually fails some design metrics (which is why it fails the Core Web Vitals Assessments–although again, this Assessment is essentially “Google’s opinion”, many professional web developers at least try to get a passing on this.) The site may have some design issues and some bad js calls, as well as even worse design issues on mobile, but performance is not a problem unless you are using either (or both) a very old machine or a browser that is dated and has tremendously poor javascript processing speed.
In fairness, discourse is much heavier than vBulletin was, which was quite light regardless how many tabs you had open. Opening a bunch of tabs in discourse is significantly more expensive.
That’s actually a good one. Since I almost exclusively access the Dope on my phone I never use tabs. Discourse is much less tab-friendly than vBulletin, IMO. On the rare occasions I check the dope at the computer, I don’t use tabs anymore because I don’t like the active interaction across multiple tabs. vBulletin tabs were static. Hell, you could load up a bunch of tabs on vBulletin and then disconnect from the internet and read offline if you wanted.
One thing I find different and worse, and maybe it’s just the way I use the board, but the old SDMB had different forums that felt substantially different in tone and character. Cafe Society felt different than General Questions or the BBQ pit - almost like separate board cultures. I liked that.
But while Discourse can be used the same way, I’ll bet that most people just hit the ‘unread’ and ‘new’ buttons, which smears everything together. It’s all starting to look pretty much the same. I have also gotten warnings for posting something inappropriate for a particular forum, because I had no idea I was IN that forum.
Right now, the screen shows me the title of the thread, the edit box and preview, and nothing else. I have no idea what forum/category am typing this in.
Other than that, I think Discourse is a pretty good improvement. I hate infinite scrolling, but this is probably the best implementation of it I’ve seen. I would still prefer pagination, but this is acceptable.
That’s nothing new though. On vB, I’d been using the New Posts button almost exclusively. The only time I’d ever go into an individual forum is if I was looking for something specific.
I do the same thing here.
I’m not sure if it’s an admin setting or a plug-in, but that can be turned off. I use quite a few Discourse boards, and this is the only one that still erases your quote (for your own good, don’t you know).
What is it that people dislike so much about infinite scrolling? I’ve seen that comment from time to time since the great switchover, but no explanation?
I like it. But apparently I use a simpler version designed for the easily overstimulated. I can understand people feeling differently. I am aesthetically sensitive to poor colour and font. However, the best thing about the board is the content. The worst? Let’s ask Discobot…. And you don’t really want to talk to Discordbot…
