Additional to the tracking system, you can also bookmark threads. Your bookmarked threads are listed in your profile under Activity-Bookmarks.
Thank you.
It’s not that certain navigation methods impose “too much resistance”, it’s that, if there are a number of ways to achieve a goal, people will tend to use the most obvious one. This can still result in different methods being used because “goals“ can be subtly different, and what is “obvious” can differ between people.
My “goal”, after reading a thread, is to find a new one to read. In Discourse, the most obvious way for me to do that is to use the direct thread links near the bottom of the page. This means I move from forum to forum without being particularly aware of it. I could be reading a GQ thread, then BBQ, then MPSIMS, back to GQ etc. It creates a bit of a “rabbit warren“ effect. This is not necessarily a bad thing, websites like https://tvtropes.org/ are famous for sucking you in for hours by having lots of links to “related content”.
On the old board, the most obvious way for me to find a new thread was to use the “back” function on my browser to take me back to the forum the previous thread had come from. Thus I was always going back to the same forum until I had exhausted the new and/or interesting threads it contained. I was anchored to one style of thread until I decided to move to another one. It felt more structured.
Note that my goal could have been subtly different. If my goal was to “go back to the forum this thread came from and see what else is there”, I would have looked harder for ways of doing that in Discourse and probably seen the forum links at the bottom of the thread earlier or used the hamburger menu.
None of this is intended as criticism of Discourse, I’m just trying to dig a bit deeper than the cosmetics to see why it feels different.
Yeah - like we’ve both said, folk do things differently.
Me, I generally work my way thru the forums, from COVID to MPSIMS, skipping some. So in the old system, I started at COVID, skimmed whether anything interested me, then moved to GQ.
OR - if I had been interested in a hot thread in - say - Cafe - I’d go right there. Wasn’t too much effort to remember which forums I had been in, and make my way through the list.
In the new forum, I generally click on my icon in the top right - IF anyone had responded to a thread I posted in. I generally check all of those threads, then make my way thru the forums as before.
I was using your term “resistance.” (Trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to insert a Borg reference…) I found it funny that you mentioned the list of threads on the right - which I basically never even look at, and the back button - which I never use.
I am not a big fan of much tech, and I figure as soon as I figure something out or like something, it will change. So I just figure out the lowest tech way to do what I want to do, and reconcile myself to figuring out a NEW simplistic approach when things change. And I’m REALLY good at ignoring stuff that I’m not interested in. I think my approach might make me somewhat less susceptible to the type of direction you describe.
Thank you!!! The right mouse button on my mouse broke just a bit ago. Instead of buying a new mouse, I’ve just been finding ways around it. That was the feature I missed the most. This is a great help. Thank you!
Thanks! I’m glad to finally know where that is. It’s surprising that it’s buried down there. It seems like it would be better on the profile activity page with the Topics/Replies/etc.
I used to do that in VB SDMB. I’d read my subscribed threads, then GQ, MPSIMS, IMHO, Cafe, Games, and finally GD and BBQ if bored. On the new boards I’m not doing that.
This is exactly my experience. I used to do that, and now I don’t. So it feels different – less organized, less coherent.
I think it’s partly also that the pages for the topics aren’t very attractive themselves, though, not just that there are easier ways to find a new thread.
That’s part of it for me. The size of the clickable space on the threads is larger than the size of the clickable space on the topic names. You can click almost anywhere on the thread names on the right and get taken to the thread, whereas you have to click only on the name of the topic on the left to get taken to that topic. I think clicking on the description should also take you there because it is parallel with the functionality on the right and the topic names themselves are not obviously hyperlinks, so there’s no way to know where you’re supposed to hover over except by trial and error.
That is just curious. We have the same preferences. Somehow or another, I readily slipped into a practice that allows me to do essentially the same w/ the new boards, while something about the change urged you in a different direction.
I just realized (on edit) - I never “subscribed” to threads. I just scrolled down the list, and remembered which I had posted in or had found interesting, and that had had additions since I last visited. So that is likely a difference.
Hope you find something that works for you.
Exactly. I used to click on a forum & read all the threads in that one forum I was interested in. Then hit “Back” to go back to the list of forums, choose the next one, and so on. Now, it feels much more jumbled and random, I have to consciously choose to go back to the beginning and start over because the easiest way to navigate now is just by the Suggested Topics at the bottom which throw you into a completely random forum.
I wonder if we could get the heading changed so that the topic was in font as large as the title of the thread? I think that would make a significant difference in how users interact with the forum, and help people stay topic-appropriate, as well.
That IS the easiest way to navigate IF you want things to seem jumbled and random.
OR, you could continue to scroll down - maybe 2" below the suggested topics, and click on the forum that you had opened the thread from - or any other forum you wanted to go to, No, it is not EXACTLY THE SAME as pushing the back button, but it gets you the same result.
Yeah, that’s not how it appears in my browser or on my phone. If you scroll down to the bottom, all it says is " There are 10 unread and 45 new topics remaining, or browse other topics in In My Humble Opi…" With “In My Humble Opi…” in very tiny letters.
Cool. Sorry about that. I never use my phone for the dope (or much of anything else other than phone calls and texts.) It took me a while to figure out how I could easily switch among forums. And I only use the “theme” I do because someone recommended it. Now that I have found the way to move about, it is really painless.
When you are in a thread, at the very top, just under the thread title, does it list the forum? IMHO for this thread? If you click on that, it takes you back to THAT forum’s list of threads. And clicking on the equivalent box at the top of THAT page will allow you to switch among forums. (At least, that’s how it works on my computer/browser.) It is a BIT of a pain to scroll up to the top, but that hyper scroll thing makes it less of a pain.
IIRC, at first, the black list of forums at the bottom didn’t seem to work correctly, so I was doing the scroll to the top thing.
Hope you figure something out. Wish I were sophisticated enough to help.
Well that sucks donkey balls. I used thread subscriptions kind of like bookmarks. Oh, this thread tells me how to do ___ or that thread has the pros & cons of a new ___ that I’m considering purchasing in the near future. By subscribing, I could go back & find them after they had fallen off the front page.
Pagination & the scroll bar in VBulitten gave me a good idea where I was in a thread. I’m not seeing the scroll bar in my standard configuration (Firefox 77.x w/ Ghostery & NoScript); I’ve adjusted settings to give it more permission but have not had success yet. I can see that scroll bar in Chrome but to use my preferred browser setup it doesn’t work.
Also, we need a good theme that gets rid of all the wasted white space on either side. tim314’s theme is the best I’ve seen so far but it’s not in our theme list; not sure if a mod can add them or only an admin?
That’s what the “bookmark” button does. You’ll get a list of bookmarked topics in your profile.
That may be a better way to do that here but it doesn’t do anything to bring over those that I had subscribed to in VBulliten & have now lost.