Vote of No Confidence
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Not uncommon for me. On a traditional forum (for example: the daily wtf) I would go through a discussion to the end, then think "there was a post on page 3 somewhere I want to reply to". Then I would just click the Page 3 link and find it. With Discourse I have to scroll endlessly to find it if the topic has lots of replies. If the devs here aren't going to put in pagination, then letting me put a post number in would get me close enough to what I want to find.
That's kind of what I was getting at. Pages are so much better than this dumb ass continuous scrolling that Discourse gives us. It's like the team behind Discourse is too busy implementing flashy, resume padding features to actually consider whether those features are a good idea. And the DWTF team (looking at you @apapadimoulis) already made a decision, so screw the user base.
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why not filter down to @Lorne_Kates posts only, there is a topic map at top of topic, click on the interesting users.
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I never even use OSX most of the time (it's been years), and I see scroll bars all the time.
Obvious apple fail, then, I should say?
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why not filter down to @Lorne_Kates posts only, there is a topic map at top of topic, click on the interesting users.
Because, as I said, I'm not even certain that it was him. And why should I have to go back to the top of the thread to find something in the middle?
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I have one minor grape, when I double click a word in a post, I expect to see it getting selected. In discourse I have to drag my mouse across.
Is this double clicking configuration based or it is something we have to learn to live with?
In other words, is there some setting adjustment that can be done?
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I have one minor grape, when I double click a word in a post, I expect to see it getting selected. In discourse I have to drag my mouse across.
Is this double clicking configuration based or it is something we have to learn to live with?
In other words, is there some setting adjustment that can be done?
It works for me in Chrome.
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I have no idea what you're talking about. Discourse works exactly like any other text-based website in that regard.
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Though technically magnificent I don't see how it appeases the give me paging or give me death crew.
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I haven't noticed that, either. But I have noticed that it breaks my ability to highlight and drag text in Chrome, for example if I wanted to drop a word or phrase into the search bar, or copy it to another application. Instead it redoes the highlighting based upon my dragged mouse. Anyone else experience this?
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It seems like if you offered an opt-out of infinite scrolling, the vast majority of the userbase here would take it.
I don't see why it has to be one way or the other. Make it a user preference already.
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Yep, it's doing that for me as well. Time to dig into the code!
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Yeah, I'm seeing this as well, but only because I specifically tried it. If I want to search something I usually just highlight, right click, 'Search Google for $term'. Also super useful: Google dictionary
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Because then you know where you are in a topic relative to the whole length of the topic. It mirrors the way people interact with books, music CDs, heck even movies have "scenes" that you can skip to. Stuff like "I saw a good post about a third of the way through this thread" is extremely common for me. And from some of these posts, others too.
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@sam - you wouldn't happen to be the same sam as on the meta.discourse.org forum would you? That Sam Saffron listed as Co-founder Civilized Discourse Construction Kit? If so, it seems that you are only here with to champion Discourse, regardless of the opinions of actual users of this shitty forum software.
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It works for me in Chrome.
I am using IE11 on Windows 7 through a remote machine located at my client's location. I am able to double click a word and select it on StackOverFlow, but not here on what.thedwtf?
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Why not precompute the height of posts and then put the scrollbar in the right place relative to the topic instead of the currently loaded section of the topic?
It's basically a nightmare to precompute the height of a rich text block with proportional letter sizes and spacing, media blocks, paragraph margins and paddings, and that's without considering DPI, units other than pixels, and users who use non-default font size.
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I haven't noticed that, either. But I have noticed that it breaks my ability to highlight and drag text in Chrome, for example if I wanted to drop a word or phrase into the search bar, or copy it to another application. Instead it redoes the highlighting based upon my dragged mouse. Anyone else experience this?
I'm missing the ability to drag highlighted text in Chrome as well. Must be another "bug" in Discourse.
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I am using IE11 on Windows 7 through a remote machine located at my client's location. I am able to double click a word and select it on StackOverFlow, but not here on what.thedwtf?
Just tried it in IE 11 on my Win 7 box, and you're right!
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I'm missing the ability to drag highlighted text in Chrome as well. Must be another "bug" in Discourse.
Yes, dragging text around is also not working for me. If this were not a client's machine, I would happily install Firefox and be on my way.
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Because then you know where you are in a topic relative to the whole length of the topic.
Ha ?
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Yes, dragging text around is also not working for me. If this were not a client's machine, I would happily install Firefox and be on my way.
TRWTF is that you're browsing TDWTF using a client's machine.
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Updated my profile here, click on my ugly face
<----
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Ha ?
Ok, that shows you where you are in a thread, but it doesn't make getting back there any easier.
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heck even movies have "scenes" that you can skip to. Stuff like "I saw a good post about a third of the way through this thread" is extremely common for me. And from some of these posts, others too.
I think this is the crux that some of you are struggling with, you think of topics in the terms of discrete chuncks of N posts.
We are totally open to improving nav to improve stuff, eg browse by date, or even add better controls to skip to post N or chunk N.
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but it doesn't make getting back there any easier.
We keep track of where you were at last and "resume" your position, in general you want to "resume" that is the 99% use case.
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Updated my profile here, click on my ugly face
I'll take that as an affirmative. So we can effectively blame you for all the shit that we see in Discourse.And either @apapadimoulis is all buddy-buddy with you and made you an admin, or you have some sort of back-door to grant yourself admin rights. If it's the first case, whatever. If it's the second case, it's just another reason to hate Discourse. Writing the source code doesn't give you the right to have admin privileges to every instance of it.
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I think the crux is that you guys are trying to alter paradigms that don't need to be altered. I've never once in my life felt limited by forum software with paging.
That said, I am getting used to the unlimited scrolling thing, but as a former web developer the complexity and chance for bugs kind of scares me. It's so far beyond what HTML/JS/DOM and web browsers were intended for IMO.
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some sort of back-door to grant yourself admin rights.
In open source software, that is NSA level competency I do not aspire to.
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Again please read the Cathedral and the Bazaar a very nice book by ESR.
Dear God will somebody kill Nagesh for me?
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We are totally open to improving nav to improve stuff, eg browse by date, or even add better controls to skip to post N or chunk N.
That would be great. Knowing where I am in a topic is only part of the solution, I also need to be able to navigate to any part of the topic, otherwise that info is useless.
I think this is the crux that some of you are struggling with, you think of topics in the terms of discrete chuncks of N posts.
Have you never clicked on Youtube's progress bar for a video to navigate within that video? Have you never gone back and re-read certain chapters of a book? Have you never skipped to a certain scene in a movie, or skipped to a certain song in a CD?
Using Discourse is like going back to the days of cassette tape. Want to listen to a specific certain song? Prepare to spend a lot of time rewinding or fast-forwarding and hoping that when you press "Play" you're where you want to be!
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Technically what we are doing here is far more complex than paging, Discourse really is rainbows, nothing is stopping one of you writing a plugin that gives you godawful paging.
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We would love to improve in topic navigation. At the moment you have a few options
- Summary mode in the top
- Filter by user (click on my face <--- filter my posts)
- Go to top, bottom (kbd shortcut or click small up / down arrow on widget)
- Filter by multiple users, go to top, click on small avatars
I feel we are missing:
- Shortcut to go to a particular post
- A way to "browse by date" (cluster stuff in days)
- A cleaner way to filter down sub conversations
more ideas totally welcome, ones with mockups etc help best, getting the UI right is most of the problem (if you have detailed ideas can you make a discrete topic for it)
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We keep track of where you were at last and "resume" your position, in general you want to "resume" that is the 99% use case.
Did you not understand the use case that I described before, and that I've seen others echo? You stumble across a thread that sounds interesting, and maybe it already has 100 posts. You read through the entire thread in order to get a feel for the entire thread, the direction it's going, etc. Along the way, you take note of interesting posts that you'd like to come back to and comment on after you've read the entire thread. Except, how do you find those posts that you wanted to comment on? In the old CS forums we are used to here at thedailyWTF, you just went back to the right page, went about the right spot on the page, and bam, you'd reply. In Discourse, if you want to work a thread that way, you're just screwed, cause guess what? You CAN'T just scroll to where that post is.
Now, I can see you trying to puzzle out why someone might want to do that. I give you a few reasons:
- Maybe someone has already replied to the comment the same way you want to, and your comments would add nothing to the conversation.
- Maybe there's an argument is on about a point in the post, and your reply would be put to better use in response to another post.
- Maybe that point has already been abandoned in the thread and going back to it would just piss off people who are already in the thread.
As I type this, I come to hate the way lists are done in Discourse. Why the hell do I need to hit the list item button for every item in my list? Every other online text editor I use assumes that I want to continue my list until I tell it otherwise. having to hit that button to add an item to my list is a pain in the ass.
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Dear God will somebody kill Nagesh for me?
Are you willing to reimburse travel expenses?
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Discourse really is rainbows
Good metaphor, in that both work only if you look at them properly, lack any substance, and are difficult to navigate.
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Discourse really is rainbows,
nothing is stopping one of you writing a plugin that gives you godawful paging.
There are plugins? And nobody thought to mention this?
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It's basically a nightmare to precompute the height of a rich text block with proportional letter sizes and spacing, media blocks, paragraph margins and paddings, and that's without considering DPI, units other than pixels, and users who use non-default font size.
Yeah, try impossible. You have to render the data in the browser or it won't work. You can get it close enough for a small number of elements, but if you have 200 elements the margin of error will quickly make your scrollbar inaccurate. Clearly Ben has never tried this..
Oddly, your best bet might just be to load and render the entire thread at once. Maybe when you first go into a thread it takes you to the last post you read. Above that there's a "load entire beginning of thread" button and it just does that AJAX-ily and then nothing else is dynamic.
"That's slow to render!" Only if you're actually loading those posts. And browsers are pretty fast now.
"Too much data transfer!" And doing hundreds of little AJAX requests is better?
"Hard to navigate a single-page thread!" No worse than infinite scrolling. And your scrollbars would work again and the browser wouldn't be dynamically requesting data every time you scrolled up or down a bit. The page would be more-or-less static, with fewer "spinners" and jerky loading. Oh, and ctrl + F would work, hallelujah!
Anyway, this thread is already 231+ posts and trying to read from the beginning, with infinite scroll or with "just load the whole damn thing" is not going to be fun.
Of course I still think paging is best, but if you're seriously against paging, I think loading the whole thing makes more sense than trying to do it dynamically.
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In Discourse, if you want to work a thread that way, you're just screwed, cause guess what? You CAN'T just scroll to where that post is.
Serious question: would the bookmark icon on each post facilitate this? I've not used it; does it let you flag posts for easy navigation in the future?
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Are you willing to reimburse travel expenses?
Yes, but not murder weapons. My accountant says I can't deduct those any more.
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Technically what we are doing here is far more complex than paging, Discourse really is rainbows, nothing is stopping one of you writing a plugin that gives you godawful paging.
And this just emphasizes a comment I made earlier. You guys included the continuous scrolling as nothing more than "see what we can do!" Somewhere along the way, you convinced yourselves that it's the way of the future. Now that you've done it, you're married to it, and won't give it up for anything. In fact, you've convinced yourself that it's better than what we, the users, want. In fact, you're condescending tone makes it clear that you think you know better than us users. You do realize that many (if not all) of us here are IT professionals? Saying we want it a certain way has nothing to do with us being ignorant, or difficult. It's because we see through the bells and whistles. We see the lack of usability, and we hate it.
Have you never clicked on Youtube's progress bar for a video to navigate within that video? Have you never gone back and re-read certain chapters of a book? Have you never skipped to a certain scene in a movie, or skipped to a certain song in a CD?
Using Discourse is like going back to the days of cassette tape. Want to listen to a specific certain song? Prepare to spend a lot of time rewinding or fast-forwarding and hoping that when you press "Play" you're where you want to be!
This, a thousand times this!!
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You read through the entire thread in order to get a feel for the entire thread, the direction it's going, etc. Along the way, you take note of interesting posts that you'd like to come back to and comment on after you've read the entire thread. Except, how do you find those posts that you wanted to comment on? In the old CS forums we are used to here at thedailyWTF, you just went back to the right page, went about the right spot on the page, and bam, you'd reply.
I see a "bookmark" button but it doesn't seem to do what I'd like it to.
Have you seen the widget in the right margin of IDEs like Sublime Text or Visual Studio (possibly with Resharper)? It could highlight points of interest with a widget like that.
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Serious question: would the bookmark icon on each post facilitate this? I've not used it; does it let you flag posts for easy navigation in the future?
I don't find that feature sufficient because I do not know whether or not I would like to reply to a certain post until I have reached the end of the thread and see where the conversation has gone. For the reasons @abarker mentioned, there is no point in bookmarking every post that I might potentially reply to along the way
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godawful paging.
What's so troublesome about paging?
It doesn't prevent you from reading.We are totally open to improving nav to improve stuff, eg browse by date, or even add better controls to skip to post N or chunk N.
Maybe you should re-implement the scrollbar entirely so that it works kind of like a video progress bar. I'm not sarcastic. It seems in line with DC's vision of UI. /devilsadvocate
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In [pages] forums we are used to here at thedailyWTF, you just went back to the right page, went about the right spot on the page,
For threads with a dozen pages or more, this is actually just completely false. For me anyway. Good luck finding which page your interesting post was on. Was it 3? Let's read it... no ok, 4? let's read that... 5?... 6?Infinite scrolling does not solve this, obviously, but it also isn't the slap in the face you make it out to be.
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I don't understand this freaking out, scrollbar is even more broken on traditional forums, If I want to scroll to the bottom of a topic it only allows me to scroll to the end of page 1.
Sorry if this is offensive, but are you retarded if this is the best counter-argument you can come up with? Scrollbar scrolls the currently displayed view, which on a traditional forum consists of a number of posts. If you move the scrollbar thumb to the top, you get to see the first post on the page, and if you move it to the middle, you get to see approximately the middle of the page. Contrast this with Discourse, where the scrollbar thumb has no relation at all with anything - if you move it somewhere, it might stay there - or it might jump to some random place, while the view doesn't change.
And you don't even offer a replacement for it (no, the post counter at the bottom (except when it's not) of the window is not a replacement - it doesn't show where in the discussion I am, and I can't use it to move around the discussion.
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Why the hell do I need to hit the list item button for every item in my list?
Write dashes or asterisks for each item, like old-school plaintext. Yeah, there's no inline help for MarkDown, but that's how it works.
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His keyboard obviously doesn't have keys other than a-z, 0-9, and _.
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What's so troublesome about paging?
I'm shocked that anyone could be so intensely anti-paging, to be honest. I never even realized it was a thing people could be against.
