I like the cut of your jib!
You can get it back when you learn to control your potty-mouth.
(Just kidding, if only.)
As a serious answer to your question, the thread in the Discourse product forum linked above will get more attention than complaints here. I’ve seen a couple responses from Discourse product managers, so they are reading it.
And as a PM myself, my tips on how to get product people to listen to you: explain the problem that the feature solved for you in detail. Don’t complain, don’t try to divine the reasons they made the change. Trust me, the people who made the change thought they were doing the right thing; they weren’t doing it to be jerks. So point out the scenarios (or “use cases”) they missed when they came up with it.
Your goal should be to make sure they understand the problem you have, not to convince them to revert the change. Maybe they come up with some new, better way to solve your problem. But if you go into it saying “change it back!” they’ll most likely just dismiss it as someone resistant to change. Let them reach the decision themselves that the best plan is to go back to what it was.
Here’s a good example from the thread of how to provide feedback that PMs will listen to.
My use cases:
- Discoverability: We’re always working to get new people to our site and some of these people do not have a lot of experience with forums. No button means the feature doesn’t exist to them.
- Mobile: It’s harder to select text on mobile. If you’re like me and your hands shake a bit, you end up with the selection zipping up to the top and then to the bottom before you finally give up. And as someone mentioned, selecting a graphic is hard on mobile.
- Gamification: We have a LOT of games on our site where you quote the previous person’s post. These games are a great way to get new people comfortable with using the forum. Also, I use it probably 100 times in 2-hours during my online happy hour event to quote a person and award them a prize. It’s much faster to use the button (one click) to selecting and then clicking.
nm
Informative, thank you!
Looks like they’re reverting it for now. We’ll see how long it takes to roll out.
Nice.
Not sure why they’d think about “revisiting” a reversal that brings back a convenient and useful feature.
From the Discourse forum:
Not exactly, no. We don’t track user behaviors at this level of granularity, nor do we do explicit user testing for every UI change.
Translation: We don’t know how users use Discourse very well and we don’t talk to them much, and so we don’t really know what changes will seem important to them.
For bigger changes, we do try to roll things out in a way that is not disruptive and allows us to gather more feedback from real usage.
We didn’t anticipate this change being one that deserved that kind of treatment. The feedback here suggests we may have gotten that wrong – and we’re listening.
Translation: Every time we make a change, we cross our fingers that it’s a good one, and if people holler loud enough after we make it, we might revert it. Might.
Seems like most businesses in 2025…
Indeed.
Good news anyway…
Yay ! It’s back.
My world improved today!
And the upload button is gone, too!
I’ve still got it !
I still have the upload button.
Yep, bubble is back, upload still there. WOOT.
Oh, interesting. Upload is not available on my phone, but it is available on my computer.
@engineer_comp_geek, no fix for the upload yet?
Uploading is not permitted on this site… that button could go.
We’re not a hosting site. Regular users should not be uploading anything to the SDMB.
The button is there because Admins and Cecil are permitted to upload things.
Have they ever uploaded something? Do they expect to in the future? I don’t see the value in exposing a capability that almost no one is allowed to use and the few that could use it don’t exercise it. It’s a high-risk, low-reward design choice.
Maybe it’s possible to hide it in all the standard themes. For example, on my phone, the upload button isn’t there, so it is possible to hide it. Could we also hide it in desktop themes as well? Admins and Cecil could have their own themes that display all the capabilities.
Yep. All of the images in this post, for example.
The default for Discourse is to allow users at higher trust levels to upload images and files. The only people we allow at higher trust levels are mods, admins, and Cecil. So we basically get the behavior that we want as the Discourse default just by the way that we have set up trust levels here.
We don’t tinker with the themes ourselves. We let the Discourse staff handle that. We’re not going to be putting anything custom into the themes here, other than what they have already set up for us.