Software updates do happen, and this is one of those things that would be fairly typical for one.
My question is more whether the Dope is merely running on someone else’s servers, and is administered by the Dope staff, or whether it’s a software-as-a-service deal, where all the Dope staff does is manage the content (i.e. moderate and that sort of thing), and the nitty-gritty technical stuff like capacity provisioning, software updating, and so forth is part of the service.
Even if it’s the latter, you’d think there’d be a set of release notes that could be published listing the changes.
Basically all we do is moderate. Software updates are automatic and done by Discourse.
There are some release notes, but I didn’t notice any specific to the hamburger menu. I’m still looking.
We may be able to add items to the hamburger menu. I’m testing a few things and then need to run it by the Modloop. If approved, Ed Zotti would have to implement the change as our only person with Admin privledges.
So they seemed to have made the Menu more customizable but I’m not even sure what all we lost. I know the link to all tags and the top 10 categories are gone. I’m not sure beyond that.
Thanks. I have my categories back, and have added ATMB to the list as it never was in the old uncustomizeable list for me, so it’s actually an improvement for me.
@What_Exit , if you customize it to have at least one tag, it will also add an “all tags” item.
I had added Tags to a new section.
It gives me the option to make this section public, but as a Mod I don’t have authority to do so. Chances are that Ed does. But I’m still in the poke around and investigate mode.
Also by tomorrow, Discourse might make changes, they often roll things out and then make tweaks or fixes within the day.
I noticed that the hamburger menu was missing the things I usually used it for, so I checked Site Feedback and didn’t see anything there, and wondered if it was just broken for me.
Shouldn’t this thread have been in Site Feedback rather than ATMB, since it’s about the Discourse software rather than the SDMB in particular?
We should “@” mention our indubitable Discurse representative @c oding
horror each time a fucking stupid change is rolled out, leaving us to guess how to make the software work as expected.
One suggestion I have, have his own dev/design team on a blind A/B dogfood test, actually use their own software, seeing as Mr. Atwood himself appears not to care.
There were a few terrible changes that lasted only minutes. Like the huge font I screencapped. And it was giving a live-preview side-by-side split-screen for typing posts/replies. Neither of which are suitable for phone use. There was also a change where the user avatar in threads was put in a seperate column on the left leaving less space for the text, and the text of each post was in its own “box”, as in when you thumbed the screen up or down in would scroll within that box, not within the whole page. It was massively bad.
That all sounds horrible. Thankfully, none of that happened to me.
Okay, I have played with my settings and I think I have something that works for me on my phone.
Here’s what I did – and I did this on a laptop, even though I mostly use my phone:
I clicked on my icon in the upper right corner (for me, an image of a puzzle)
I clicked on “Profile” (the little picture of a person)
I clicked on “preferences” (the gear)
I clicked on “sidebar” (all the way to the right, with both a picture of the hamburger menu and the word “sidebar”)
Under “categories Section” I selected the categories I tend to visit. After I saved, this put those categories in the lower part of the hamburger menu
Under tags I picked a single tag. After I saved this put both that tag and an option for “all tags” below the categories in the hamburger menu
Under navigation I chose “link to unread/new and show a count of items”. After I saved this put a toggle on the left of my phone screen that lets me toggle among “categories”, “New(#)”, “Latest (#)”, “Top”, and “Unread (#)”
After saving, I have a different interface than I used to have on my phone, but it is actually pretty friendly. It was just complicated to get there from where the change dumped me.
having said that, I’m still finding it awkward to navigate to “latest” and “unread” on my laptop. I seem to need to scroll to the top of a thread and click the site logo, and then pick on of those. What am I missing?
(also, who thought that we need easy access to birthdays, anniversaries, and badges?)
“Latest” appears to be “Everything” now in the menu. Don’t know about unread.
Also, when I just looked, my menu had the Categories grouping with an “add” link right in the menu dropdown, so I didn’t have to go through the steps you did. That wasn’t there earlier today.
Mine had links to threads from two years ago that I hadn’t finished reading. They disappeared as I clicked on them, and now the list just shows the 16 most recent alerts.
‘Everything’ takes me to ‘Latest’, Discourse-classic.
(But as long as we all still have endless scrolling which is what matters to a message board . . . certainly not having all the links resolve to the same page regardless of theme that’s crazy talk!)