This!
I didn’t make it through all the text in the two-part OP… was this one of the predetermined categories?
(Me, I’m category 7: Those who don’t pay attention to people who put others in categories)
I do empathize, and you’re NOT “pathetic” at all. Give us a chance and stick around! 
[quote=“kevlaw, post:57, topic:917400”]
Some people get frustrated by this because they want to know everything before they do anything. I make the links to the advanced documentation findable but not obvious.
One minor example, keyboard shortcuts are really powerful for the people that know how to use them and I appreciate the person that posted the Discourse shortcut tips. But for many, the very mention of keyboard shortcuts reminds them of when they were trying to learn DOS and that’s a very dark place for them.
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This. I too am one of the Those People who “want to know everything before they do anything”. That’s because learning new software is a very specific kind of learning. For those of us who have a negative amount of interest in the insides of how this stuff works, there’s only two ways to figure it out.
One, have someone standing there (or a screen open to the same effect) to say, see that dot up on the left? Click on that dot. Now pick ‘systems config’. When that box opens, check all the boxes EXCEPT Mode One. Keep scrolling until you find all the boxes. Then click Update. No, update is right there underneath the smiling man icon at the bottom between the “printer functions” and the little pointing hand. There! Now you turned your screen green like you wanted.
Two, flail around for an hour trying to find shit on the screen. Succeed or give up trying in frustration. You will not remember how to repeat what you did because there were so many failures and detours and then the three times you had to reboot your computer to get back to where you were at the beginning.
See how fun new software is?
Other kinds of learning I do is nothing much like this. Mostly it builds on a skill I already have (say, I’m embroidering, but I know how to hand sew and I know how to draw). Make a mistake and it is very clear how many steps backward I need to go to start fresh. Or this morning, teaching my horse to travel in a circle around me. I know to watch for and how to reward incremental progress, and how to correct myself if I am obviously giving her the wrong signal. If she is getting confused I can just stop, do something else until we are both ready to try again. Both of these examples have repetitiveness, and rhythm. Learning software does not.
Learning software, here is only one way that will get you to your goal, and the signposts are invariably both opaque and there are ten times or maybe 100 times more of them than you can possible use (how did I end up at the pay signup for Google Games when all I wanted to do was copy this photo to a file?). Everything happens INSTANTLY so once you click on something accidentally you are somewhere off on another planet. There’s no journey, no retracing steps, no small corrections, no ‘body memory’ or instinctive judgement (color sense, animal mind awareness, how to move your wrist to make that stitch) to help you. All you have is a vague sense of how other websites have worked, some of them anyway.
So I don’t get why people find it effortless, or no big deal. I don’t find it either one.
Kudos for saying so articulately what I was sputtering mentally to say.
thank you.
One issue with the new software that annoys me is that it breaks the “back button”. On the old web-page based environment, if I clicked something by mistake I could always do it by “going back”. In this java-app based environment, that doesn’t work. If I click the wrong thing it can be tedious to return to where I was.
That’s more a useability issue for me than a learning-to-do-it issue. But I imagine it makes learning harder for a lot of people, too.
Heh, like a lot of the previous replies, I’m kind of a mix of 1,2 and 4, but it’s mostly just because I hate change of any kind, and will usually avoid it if I can. I know this is my own nonsensical problem that is divorced from any value related to the change, though. Change is gonna happen, and I’m only going to be legitimately happy or sad about it in retrospect, and my views on that may in turn change with further time. Let’s get to seeing how we use this thing, even if it is a more heavy duty interface than it needs to be. 
I thought I’d drop by with an epilogue in case anyone is interested.
My biggest takeaway from the SD transition was that you can’t do a transition like this as a big bang.
“OK, everyone. We are switching on Monday and that’s that.”
We went for a much more gradual transition. In fact, the reason for writing now is that our transition is finally coming to an end. We started out transition just after I started this thread — that’s about six months — and we finally switch off the old servers next week.
Some lessons learned ahead, for anyone who has a similar transition in their future.
The gradual transition is definitely easier on people’s nerves. We started by asking for volunteers to come and kick the tyres. This was very early when the new site was still a building site. These people were self-selected, type 4 people (refer to my OP for my typology) and they were able to see the benefits quickly and evangelize for us. Crossing the Chasm fans will recognize these people as early adopters who can see the advantages even though almost everything is worse. They trust that the other things will get better in time.
As we built out the essential functionality, we stepped up the calls for volunteers. Moving to the new server was still entirely voluntary so types 1, 2 & 3 stayed far away.
Once we determined that we had all the essential functionality in place, we strongly suggested that people need to move to the new server. This is when many of the complaints started to come in but — and this is crucial — they still had the comfort blanket of going back to the old server until the problems were fixed. They also had a large cohort who had already been using the new system for months when they arrived who could explain things.
Even after the Final Push to get everyone to switch, there are still a few people who are clinging to the old system and they are going to be very sad when the old system goes away. But we are talking dozens of sad people rather than thousands. Many of them have windows 7 and IE9 or iPad gen 1. This is the dark side of progress.
Other lessons:
We built a feedback mechanism that was separate from the discussion forum that let people vent without creating a Storm of Venting. Some of these complaints were genuine problems that we could address. More often, people just needed someone to listen and say it was going to be OK.
Part of this feedback mechanism was a series of smileys (ranging from happy to sad to angry) that people could click to say how they were feeling. The happies vastly outnumbered the sads. This gave us, the admins, a bit of confidence that we were moving in the right direction. It’s hard to know this when all you hear is venting from the type 3s.
In hindsight, we let the transition go on too long. We started to notice a few people who were trying to flip flop between the old and new (because, e.g., PDF uploads still work on the old system). We should have shut that down ages ago. There was a brief Storm of Venting about the confusion of whether people were on the old system or the new. At that point, we called “time!”
Keeping two systems going and syncing between them was a shit-ton of work. If building a new system to replace 8 years of software development was 1 MegaShitTon then keeping the two in sync during the transition was 3 MegaShitTons. It was worth it though as we were able to get everyone safely across with much less trauma than the SD experienced.
Anyway, our transition has a happy ending. Our numbers were down for a while during the transition but they recovered quickly and people are very happy with the new site.
I wonder how, with hindsight, how people feel about the transition to Discourse now.
I like it just fine but then I’m so grizzled and tech-daft I guess I didn’t know how bad I had it.
Thanks to all for all your hard work and time. You all were always patient and kind, never ever a jerk, so there is much to laud.
Does it feel like you were parenting a thousand teenagers who wanted your car keys, all at once?
My thought was that I’m not techie enough to handle the change, snd would end up being really frustrated during the transition.
So I decided to let other people be the testers.
I made sure my e-mail was up to date, but didn’t even try to open my account on the Discourse version for several months. I checked in regularly and read the posts, and kept skimming the posts about « How do I do X in Discourse? »
I finally logged in sometime in late September, I think, when most of the tumult and the shouting had died down and I’ve enjoyed the Discourse experience. I like the way it handles private messages and I don’t get the hostility to infite scroll.
The takeaway for me is in the post someone made up thread - have a cadre of people who are good techies and good explainers ( the two categories don’t always overlap 
) who can help less-techie members who have the inevitable “How do I …?” questions. I think that explaining squad was crucial to making the transition work here.
I really like how Discourse handles it when I get tired of reading either a fast moving thread or an older thread with lots of replies: unlike the previous, uh, engine? it brings me to where I left off vs “everything you didn’t read is considered read.”
I also like seeing videos that I click on to watch and it doesn’t take me out of the thread.
Avatars are nice. More smileys would be nice. A lack of a “like”, “upvote”, “agree” or the opposites still bugs me. I don’t always have the words to agree or disagree with what I read. “Hugs” or “Smack” could be fun 
As I understand it, the reason there’s no “Like” button is because in Discourse it’s tied to “community moderation” - the more “Likes” a post gets, the more it is moved to the top of the threads (apologies to @codinghorror if I’ve got that wrong). We don’t wan’t that - posts stand on their own, and don’t get pushed forward by other posters.
But, nothing wrong with you just posting “Like” underneath a post, or “What Poster X said.” I’ve done that on occasion, if I think that Poster X has summed up my position.
Naw, it affects the optional summary, but it doesn’t move posts around.
It was just disabled because tptb didn’t like it. My understanding is that folks thought it felt like a popularity contest. But i could be wrong, i wasn’t paying a lot of attention at the time.
Apology accepted, as this is completely wrong Likes are a step toward building a ‘greatest hits album’, but the only place you’d see that is on your user profile, never in the topic itself.
The generalized concern is that seeing a like count will affect your view of the world, no different than the argument that twitter or facebook should remove likes. And it is a fair argument to make. I think Instagram did actually do that recently? Let me look it up…
One thing I have noticed that I’d consider a minor unwanted side effect of likes: you do start to notice their conspicuous absence. That is, every post in a topic gets 3-4, 10, maybe 20, maybe 50 likes… then you have a post float in that has ABSOLUTELY ZERO likes. 
There’s usually… shall we say… “reasons” that this happens and you’d probably agree with those reasons, too.
If you want a fun take on this, check out Black Mirror episode called “Nosedive”
Huh, interesting. I’m in two other discourse chats, and likes aren’t nearly that common on either. What I’ve seen is that scattered posts get a like or three. Lots of likes on a post are rare and notable. Absence of likes is the norm.
Sure – it depends on the scale of the community, but for big mature ones, the dynamic I describe does eventually emerge over time.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing and it is still an improvement over the “downvote” reaction, which some communities (reddit, stack overflow etc) have.
In general likes are a (literal!) positive addition to most communities, which is why they exist in Discourse and there is no “turn off likes” option in Discourse, technically speaking, it’s mostly hiding the feature … but I completely understand long term communities not wanting to take on the concept after a decade plus without it.
Category 3 here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the current user interface other than I’m unfamiliar with it. When I was first learning Microsoft Word my reaction was “this looks more complicated than the control panel of the Space Shuttle”. Information overload and trying to figure out the conventions of new controls for anything is hard for me and takes a long time before it’s even partially intuitive. As I said in a previous post about the board changeover:
“I had this idea for a “Twilight Zone” or “Outer Limits” episode in which every day a person wakes up in a new slightly different alternate universe. Everything is the same except that all the buttons, switches, dials and controls on everything are different and non-intuitive, and our poor protagonist has to relearn how to make everything work every day”.
I looked for a like button for that.
About 3 times per day, in the community that I manage, someone say “I wish we had a like button” and 27 other people will explain all the perils of like buttons and how they will result in the inevitable Rule of the Algorithm.
I like likes. I enjoy the tiny thrill of someone clicking the little caring-heart icon on a post I wrote on Facebook. I don’t enjoy, but I appreciate, the pain of the absence of a like and I mourn the moment when my much-liked photo on Instagram fades into the mists of time and the happy little heart no longer brings me happiness.
In my community, the most common reason for not wanting likes is that if it’s too easy to click a little smiling face people will stop writing their heartfelt replies. I think they are wrong but I’m just the community manager.