I use “New Posts” mostly, but in the old view it was more evident which board a thread was on. Viewing Discord’s “Latest” on a computer, the forum name is below the thread title in a much lighter color and small font which doesn’t stand out. In the old forum, the forum name was to the right of the thread title in the same font. It made it a bit easier to filter the “New Posts” based on which forum they were in. With Discourse, all the threads just seem like a big list all together. I think this is probably one of the reasons all the threads are blobbing together for me and it doesn’t feel like distinct forums anymore.
One thing I still don’t know is how to find all the threads I’m subscribed to. I can find lists of all the replies I’ve made (Replies) and all the threads I’ve started (Topics), but I can’t find a list of all the threads I’m subscribed to (or tracking in Discourse terms). This was easy to do in the old vBulletin board from the User CP to view all subscribed threads. And it’s easy to do in most other boards that I frequent. If there is a way to do it in Discourse, it needs to be made much easier and clearer so that members aren’t fumbling around looking for it or having to ask how to get the list.
The various different forums each have their own personality and I adapt my mind frame to each as I engage with it. It’s like talking to various family members — I’m talking to Aunt Mathilda now… I must be serious. Then, later, when I talking to my brother we can joke around a bit and make crude jokes.
Now it’s like talking to Aunt Mathilda and then my brother
It’s easy enough to use the board that way. It’s simply a matter of choice.
Click on a forum, say General Questions. You get a list of threads in General questions. And New, Latest, and Top only for General Questions. You can browse, read, and reply as much as you like without ever moving away from General Questions.
You won’t see anything from another forum except in Suggested Topics at the bottom of a thread - and I find that I never look at that anyway.
When you want to move to another forum, choose one from the drop-down at the top left, and then you’re only dealing with that forum, nothing else.
If choose to bounce all over the place, that’s a conscious choice.
Disagree. Bouncing all over the place is the way I naturally use these boards. I read a thread, get to the bottom, look at the links and click one. That’s my path of least resistance. To go to the forum list would require a conscious choice. Note that I’m talking about my own “path of least resistance”, I fully acknowledge that yours may be different.
In the old SDMB my path of least resistance was to type “strai” into my Chrome address bar, click on the first SDMB auto-fill link which would take me to my User CP. Then I would read any new posts in my subscribed threads, using the back button (left 2-fingered swipe on my Apple mouse pad) to go back to my User CP each time. Then I would select “GQ” from the forum drop-down list at the bottom of my User CP page and read the forum, then select my next favourite forum from the drop-down list at the bottom, etc etc.
The common theme is that on both boards I look to the bottom of the page for navigation elements to take me somewhere else. I think if Discourse had the forum drop-down list at the bottom of every page I’d use it just like I did on the old boards.
Edit: And having just typed all that, I notice now that there is a forum list at the bottom in white text on a black background. I will probably use that from now on. For some reason I disregard that colour scheme because on many websites it contains boring shit like site maps, contact details, “about us”, etc.
One thing that I found very helpful was to mute forums that I rarely visit. You can still get to muted forums easily enough if you want to.
If you mute, say, the BBQ Pit, you will never see posts from there on the home page (Categories page) or anywhere else. On the Categories page, muted forums move from the prominent list of forums to a list in smaller grayed-out text at the bottom.
Also, they don’t appear on the ‘hamburger list’ (three bars next to your avatar).
Note that you can also press the = key anytime to get to the hamburger list and jump to another forum easily.
You can mute a forum by going into the forum and clicking the notification icon at the top. Or you can go to your Profile > Preferences > Categories and click on the Muted box at the bottom.
Watching/Tracking or whatever, where can someone find all the threads in that list? Someone above mentioned ‘Unread’, but that’s just the list of threads which have not been read. Once they are read, the Unread list no longer has the list of threads. So how can someone find all the threads they subscribed or participated in?
I’m surprised anyone could not figure out a way to navigate through these new boards pretty much however they wished.
It took me a little while to figure out how to move among forums, especially from within a thread. But If I am in the thread list, I simply use the list at the top, and if I am in a thread, I use the list at the very bottom. Absolutely simple - and no better/worse than the old boards.
I have no problem deciding which forum I am in, or getting to another. And I haven’t really tried to figure out what the links at the bottom are. It seems as tho most of them are threads I either previously read or posted in. So I find them useful - especially that they show responses.
If I wanted to use these boards in the exact manner I used the old ones, I imagine I would be frustrated.
No, I agree with others. It used to be that the path of least resistance was to browse by forum, and now it’s to bounce randomly around. And as a result, the user experience feels different. The name of the current forum is in little gray font, and not at all prominent. I’ve mis-clicked when I tried to click on it and ended up elsewhere.
It’s not a critical flaw, but it’s different, and it gives the place a very different feel. And I agree that the “topics” feel like a sloppy add-on, and not really an integral part of the experience.
I’m also interested in an answer to this question. Yes, it’s easy to find the subscribed topics with new posts, but what if I want to go back and re-read something that interested me?
Another interface question – how can I most easily open links in a new tab, rather than navigate away from the forum altogether?
Boy, it is curious how different peoples’ perceptions and experiences differ. I can’t even envision what is meant by “bouncing randomly around.” I’m an EXTREMELY unsophisticated user, and I don’t perceive anything about these new boards that encourages me to do so.
Not saying that doesn’t occur for anyone else, just marveling at how we differ.
The list on the right will most likely contain the threads you’ve posted to recently, which aren’t tied to a particular forum. The path of least resistance once you’ve done reading them is to hit your back button on the browser instead of figuring out how to get whichever forum the thread was posted in. That list is sort of like a “threads you posted in recently” list without having to do an explicit search because your threads will show up so often in them.
Hmm - pressing the back button is nothing I ever do unless expressly instructed to. Like I said, different people use things differently.
It took me a little bit to realize that I could go from forum to forum either at the top of the list of threads in a forum, or in the black space at the bottom of an individual thread. Sorry that that imposes too much “resistance” for folk.
There may or may not be a setting for that in Discourse but there’s an easy way to do this on any website, not just SDMB. The exact technique will very depending on your browser/computer. Here are a few alternatives:
Hold the CONTROL key (or COMMAND on a Mac) when you click the mouse button to open links in a new tab.
If you have a two button mouse, click the right button and then choose “open in a new tab”.
On a Mac, a two-finger tap on the touchpad will show the same menu.
On iPhone or iPad, a “long” click will do it. That is, click on the link but hold it down a little bit longer than you usually would.
Never used Android but I bet it’s the same as iOS.
You don’t have to remember all of this. Just find that works for you and remember it.
Yes, I know how to do that. But every other message board defaults to opening a new page, which is what I routinely want it to do, and so I keep making mistakes and getting annoyed. However:
