Now that I’m used to the new site and layout, I have to say that I’m very happy with Discourse and it has encouraged me to participate more.
Discourse does a better job of tracking which threads you’ve read and which ones have new posts (and how many new posts!). If I were logged into the old site and I looked at a forum, but didn’t open up all the threads with unread posts, it would assume that I didn’t want to see the unread ones and mark them all read. Because of that, I typically viewed the board without being logged in – that solved the problem. Since I wasn’t logged in, though, I was less likely to go through the hassle of opening an incognito window, logging in, and posting.
Since I’m always logged in now, adding a quick reply is much less of a pain.
Discourse does a better job of keeping pages updated – if I’m interested in a thread, I can just keep it open and new replies are added automatically.
It also does a better job of replies from e-mail – you can just reply to the e-mail that tells you there’s a new post and it gets posted to the thread.
The only thing that I found better about the old site was that you’d only get one message when a thread you were subscribed to was updated. You wouldn’t get another e-mail until you visited the thread. With Discourse, if I’m Watching a thread and it’s active, I might literally get 100 e-mails in a day. They’re all nicely threaded, but the notifications just drive me batty.
I like a lot of it - useful for tracking replies and threads, a Discobot, saves my replies as a draft when my phone runs out of juice, easy to reply and quote. It took me a bit of time to learn the easy difference between general and specific reply.
I am often logged in but sometimes logged out if my phone is recharged or if I use a different browser. My password is not sufficient and I need to open email for a link, which is a pain but not a big deal. I also don’t really need an award for quoting a link or poster, but you all made it possible, and in addition to the Academy, I’d like to thank… (unrolls scroll) the Moderators, TubaDiva, my agent McCoy, my supportive family…
That’s really about the only thing that’s still bugging me. There’s no option for ‘send me an email once per day for each thread I’ve subscribed to’, or am watching, or whatever. It’s either none at all or way too many; so I went with none at all, but I miss that doublecheck so I won’t miss something I wanted to see if the thread drops off too far below the red line on the ‘latest’ list.
That and I liked the old emojis better than the new ones; the new ones are too hard to see. But I didn’t / don’t pay all that much attention to either version.
I don’t like, but can easily ignore, Discobot.
But everything else I like as well or better; and a number of things are better.
I don’t want to be notified every single time somebody posts in the thread. That’s OK if they’re replying to me directly, and I do like and use that option; but it’s not what I want for every post in threads which sometimes accumulate a hundred posts a day.
I want to be notified once a day that threads I’ve set to whatever have (a) new post(s) in them. That’s what there isn’t an option for.
Earlier today, I was just thinking about how I’m really liking the switch to Discourse. Like all changes, it has brought some change to the old system. I’m liking many of the changes.
One of the changes I’m liking is that it’s not a flat system, so it’s more difficult to plop a turd of a post in the punchbowl and have the whole thread move in that direction. It’s still possible, but because of the notification system, it’s easier to navigate around that one post. In a flat system, it was more difficult to do.
One of the technical aspects I’m really liking is the ability to compose a draft and keep it going until I’m ready to post. Sometimes I see an article I want to post to a thread but don’t have time to write what I want about it. I just copy the article to a reply and leave it there until I’m ready to post it. The draft doesn’t leave even if I log out. I’ve had drafts sitting there for days, which allows me time to compose what I want at my convenience.
I also love the instant preview feature and the ability to link an article that shows up automatically with the article title and a preview of the article. It works great for youtube links as well.
I like the polling feature in a post. I haven’t used it yet, but it looks fun.
The notification feature has had positive and not so positive effects for me. I like being able to keep up in a thread, but I find myself not branching out as much to other threads sometimes. But that’s just a personal thing about how I have been participating.
All in all, I’m really liking the switch to Discourse.
You could try bookmarking and setting a reminder. Hit the three buttons under the post that you’re leaving off at. Then hit the button that looks like a bookmark. It should pop up a screen that allows you to put in a reminder when you choose, for say, a day or a week or more or a custom time. Then it should remind you to look at the thread to see if there are any new posts since you bookmarked it.
But it seems that I’d get a batch of reminders for threads that nobody had posted in during that time period. And one of the reasons I liked the daily-emails version was that it would let me know if a thread re-surfaced after days or weeks or months; but if the thread wasn’t getting any posts, it wouldn’t bug me about it.
– I do also like the option to start a reply and let it lie till I’ve got time to do something necessary to finish it. I’ve got one right now that’s sitting there till I have time to watch the rest of a speech.
I don’t miss pages at all. I thought I would; but, given the navigation bar, I actually like this version better. – well, except occasionally when I have to wait for it to load; plus which, it wouldn’t be possible to read a lot of preloaded stuff if the site, or my modem, were down. Discourse doesn’t seem to go down much, though; which of course was much of the point of moving.
But it’s handy, if looking back and forth at things in a long thread, to have it all right here, and not be dealing with multiple pages.
For those threads (the ones that you want to be notified if something happens), the tracking function works well. It notifies you when you’re mentioned by name, and it has a feature to let you know how many posts you’ve missed in a thread.
The bookmarking feature is for these threads, the ones where you estimate there might be hundreds of posts a day, so you don’t want to get notified every time someone posts.
It should be relatively simple to decide which of these notification systems would be used for which thread. If the thread moves from hundreds of posts a day to a slower crawl, you could change the notification system from the bookmarking feature to the tracking feature.
Between the bookmarking and reminder feature and the notification system, you could account for all the threads you used to subscribe to by email before without missing anything and skip the step of logging into your email.
I don’t log into my email. It’s pushed right to my computer program, and shows up automatically.
Maybe sometime I’ll look into the possibility of juggling threads repeatedly among three different possible setups in order to accomplish something similar to what used to be possible with one setting done once and then left alone. Pretty sure it’s not going to be today, though.
Discourse does a batch of stuff better than the old setup. This one particular thing it does worse.
Hmm, seems like I’m in the minority then. I hate this platform. It’s cluttered. The lack of pages/endless scrolling is terrible. I was never a high output poster but did read many threads in different forums. Now I hardly ever flit from forum to forum like I used to because it’s so much clunkier. It’d be nice if there were controls to personalize your “view” more.