Wait, what? On a whim I decided to check back in today to see what happened to the forums and was like, "Oh look! Discourse is gone! Maybe I'll come back..."
So this is just a temporary thing?
Wait, what? On a whim I decided to check back in today to see what happened to the forums and was like, "Oh look! Discourse is gone! Maybe I'll come back..."
So this is just a temporary thing?
One weakness of summary is that it tends to favor earlier posts which naturally have more likes, replies, views, read time, incoming/outgoing links, etc. I've talked with @eviltrout about weighting the bottom of the topic more to compensate.
You'd probably be better off having a human editor decide what is a good summary, rather than some algorithm. The algorithm will be as wrong as the person, but more difficult to change.
@many folks said:
a Progressive
What, an insurance company franchise?
Still, I hope you can find a better job soon.
What, are you jobs-ist or something?
You guys know that you can't do function calls in a hardware-based conditional breakpoint, right?
(edit: clarified breakpoint type)
Why does a face with X for eyes, conventionally indicating death, represent 'astonished'? Is he astonished that he's dead?
My blog posts usually have a bunch of citations and research.
Control groups? Falsifiable hypotheses?
Most research, isn't.
(512mb with swap will work, barely, but it is not really suitable for use by any other human beings, whereas 1 GB can run a small discussion community with ease)
What the heck is the software doing that it needs that much memory to run "well"?
Filed under: 640k ...
U+1F425
Why the hell is this (and others like it) defined as a character in a language?
I guess we should be glad @ben_lubar isn't on the Unicode committee or we'd have Dwarf Fortress glyphs defined as Unicode scalars...
I count this as a bug: I can't login using the long username*; it only lets me log in with the email address.
I didn't try the short username, because I stubbornly deny the existence of that limited form.
*Or perhaps it's randomizing my password; I don't know...
I'll have you know that my username is camelCase, thank you very much.
Someone really needs to invent camelopard-case.
I'm also one of those strange "semi-regulars" like @cconroy . . . always around, but only posting a few things here and there since way back in MMV.
@codinghorror @dkf: I think the issue with "discoverability" isn't so much "I can hover around and/or click a bunch of things to see what they can do" versus "if I want to do something, what is the most likely place I should click/hover?"
(the implied permalink)
This strikes me as another one of those "discoverability" faux pas: why on earth would I, with no prior information, think a glyph indicating a value indicating the time since a post was made - so it changes all the time - would a) be a time stamp of when the post was made or b) represent a (permanent) link to the post?
They could just replace the usernames with unique IDs before saving to the DB. Then on display, pull the latest username.
I guess I should have put "difficult" in quotes - I think that what you described is exactly what should have been implemented.
Right - but how do you animate that when jumping over, say, 50 posts? That's different than smooth scroll, which is only scrolling stuff that's just outside the viewable area. For a large jump, there is no meaningful way to animate it - not in a scrolling manner at any rate. I suppose I could tolerate a fade-out/fade-in thing, but it had better be fast. Computers are supposed to speed things up for me, and I find it seriously annoying when we add things that take time (menu fade-in, etc. Just open it when I click already! At least normally that fade stuff can be turned off...)
then animate the actual jump.
Eh, I'd prefer an instant jump, not an animated one. Stated another way: I only want to wait as long as it takes to get the information I want to see and not have to wait an additional amount of time to see all the information between where I'm at and where I want to go.
BUG: The little blue/grey badges that indicate new or unread posts don't seem to work properly if you use multiple tabs. I'm also not sure the purpose of the "There are new posts, click to show them" button (as opposed to simply just updating the little badges). Related: I can read a post, then go to the "home page" (in this case, what.thedailywtf.com) and it shows the post I just read with the grey badge.
The site costs about $2,000/month to run
I'm curious here, because I've never tried to run a website - but what drives this cost? Surely electricity and the net connection aren't anywhere close to that are they? Or is someone being paid to monitor the server(s) or something?
I also just broke a bunch of stuff by fixing my username: "This will break all replies to your posts and @name references...."
(Why on earth are those tied to a name and not a unique ID or DB key*?)
EDIT: *Ok, I know it's because it's difficult to parse the @names and turn them into a dictionary or whatever given that people type them in posts. At least at this point it only broke a couple days' worth of things...
Some kind of random bug happening for me this morning: if I keep my mouse clicked on the browser (FF uh... where the heck is the "about" dialog box now, dammit!? Ah there it is... 29.0.1) scroll bar and drag slowly down, at times the thread will jump down some large number of posts, and I have to manually scroll back up and guess where I was in the discussion. Because I don't keep my eyes glued to the X of Y widget. I suspect this has to do with the fact that the scrollbar doesn't represent progress through the posts, but something random.
Ah, for @sam and @codinghorror: just had a suggestion for that: rather than the browser scrollbar position representing pixel extent, why not just have it represent topic extent. That is, if there are 245 replies in a thread, then the scrollbar has 245 positions. If new replies get added, the scrollbar adjusts... This avoids the whole "have to render all the content first" nonsense. (By the way - I can't believe I actually just used the @name format.... * shudder *)
So replying too early is kind of an overall negative for the conversation.
This seems to be a very subjective statement....
The line between posts isn't hard-coded, it's a blend offset from the primary text color. Problem was, it was the wrong blend offset.
The blend offset sounds like it was hard-coded. General rule of thumb I use in software development: if a configuration item requires a recompile/redeploy, you're making extra work for yourself, so make it a user-configurable one and save yourself the headache. I'm lazy like that.
I can quote posts that start with I? What's the issue exactly?
Must be something about the particular gutter tolerances? Enough of us have experienced the bug that it must be something "out of the ordinary".
Is there anything less "random access" about a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump to an arbitrary post number at will? Because that's what's on the table.
I agree that a "goto post" shortcut is very random access, but it requires knowing to what post you want to go. The page links which you dislike group pages, so you only have to be "close" (and you can remember position in the array, rather than the number - which you can't do if you have to remember a post number). Also - keyboard shortcuts aren't discoverable, but page links are.
So it's not just about the "random access" - it's also about some aspects of the implementation of how that is achieved. "Next page" links provide spatial navigation - which is very powerful.
The metrics used for post relevance in topic summaries:
Those are mostly metrics of popularity, not relevance.
(Edit: added "mostly", because generalizations and all that...)
More linear than pages? Does this concept of "linear" even apply?
I guess when I see something at the bottom of a forum page like [1 2 3 4 5] I see that as nonlinear: I can, in one very small mouse motion or click, jump between discontinuous sections of content and - most importantly - visualize a large number of those sections simultaneously. I see pages as an array, which is multidimensional.
From reading the responses in this forum, I don't think I'm unique in this view that there is something more "random access" about pages that is appealing than is available through the "infinite scroll" concept - even if you start adding in things like "go to post X".
In that case, entering at the end of the topic should work
Except that if we only go to the end, we miss out on things about which to poke fun... as I said: nonlinear.
Edit: Hah I got bit by the "couldn't select the initial 'i' in a quote" thing...
The design guideline is this: remove barriers from things you want people to do. We want people to read and listen as much as possible before talking. Therefore, we remove the next page button as it is a barrier to reading.
Ok - at least now I understand the design philosophy at which you're aiming. In all honesty though I think it fundamentally doesn't work for places like TDWTF. Or places like textbooks where you want position identifiers to go find reference information - anything which needs interaction.
Note in my earlier post where I said that infinite scrolling kind of makes sense for read only information - and you specifically mentioned Slate and Ars Technica: new sites - traditionally read-only media.
At TDWTF forums, we aren't here to listen as much as possible before talking - we are here to poke fun, reply to things that piqued our interest or curiosity, in a very nonlinear manner, and as fast as possible - things for which "infinite scroll" is not well-suited, because infinite scroll is extremely linear.
You never complain about this on other forums, but now we're on Discourse and suddenly it's an affront to your personal sovereignty?
I wasn't complaining, just asking what thought process makes people think their choices for colors should be hard-coded in their products. Especially with things like CSS that make it very easy to assign symbolic names to things like that (and, in fact, they already have names....). So why not just make them user-editable and stored in the database?
As a lazy developer, if there's ever a way I can make my life easy by allowing a user to configure something themselves so they don't have to keep coming back to bug me to change the code to do it, I make that thing configurable.
Also - I don't understand what color palettes have to do with skins - they are different beasts. (And I happen to agree that skins are much more difficult).
The problem I have with pagination is that it's a barrier to reading, and reading is fundamental.
I'm seriously curious - what do you mean by that?
I'm assuming it is coming from some sort of hypothesis that changing pages destroys reading, but have there been any kind of studies done that show this, as opposed to perhaps the hypothesis that the human brain may actually process information better in pages? After all, we use paragraphs, because if we didn't then reading would be almost impossible.
Also, isn't this a forum, where discussion is fundamental?
would wait, the extremely light bar between posts was actually a bug related to us normalizing on a standard set of colors in the new EZ themer. So that wasn't anything you guys set, it was our fault.Let me deploy the latest now and see if it helps. edit: yes, definitely darker default lines between posts now. Better? I agree it was crazily light before.
Why are color settings ever anything other than a per-user preference?
(The only legitimate reasons I can think of for non-changeable colors/fonts is something like a game where you want everyone to have the same constraints or if you are doing read-only media for brand recognition.)
Edit: stupid "can't edit just whitespace" message...
Pages are arbitrary, why does everything need to be split into 50 item chunks, why not 25 or 102?
How is "one chunk" any less arbitrary than n chunks of m items each?
Correct solution: allow the user to choose
I hate this term, on the grounds that the icon looks more like a stack of pancakes.
Or a stargate*.
Or a ventilation cover.
*One of the "elevator" types, not the portal kind.
yeah, why? give me a real example.
You've never put tabs in a physical book, or seen why people put those little cut-outs in the pages of thick books? Or just knowing roughly "it's about a third of the way in" kind of thing?
Simply stated: "Location" memory is better than search, especially when you remember where you saw something but not enough about it to do a search on it, or if there is so much similar junk in the discussion that a search is not helpful.
(Edit: I modified my word choice: muscle->location)
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.
This is because a scrollbar is a geometric thing, not a conceptual thing: move to the bottom/top/roughly this position in the window. Scrolling to the bottom of the window in "traditional" forums of course scrolls to the bottom of page one; if you want the end of topic, you use the "end of topic" link/button/etc.
Discourse is odd: I move the scroll thingy to the top of the window now, and it goes some small fraction of the way up the content, then jumps the scroll thingy to the middle of the scrollbar. There is zero correlation between the position of the scrollbar indicator and the relative position of the content with respect to the start or end of the "page" - this is why "infinite scrolling" makes no sense - at least not with a scroll bar UI element.
Convert the value 25 into an 8-bit binary number. Show your working.
This is a poorly defined question:
Edit: added more pedantry! (And I missed locallunatic's observation....)
I don't agree that CS is "fully usable", but it's inarguably 7 years old. Next year, it will be 8. Then 9. At what point is it too old?
Only in computers does "old" seem to be taken as "inferior." Moreso than in any other industry (even automobiles), for some reason people (esp. OSS people) seem to think that change for the sake of change is good - rather than just keeping what works and refining it. But no! Now I have yet another stupid UI to deal with (and on top of it, I forgot to disable auto updates on Firefox at work... so now my title bar is gone. sob).
In my mind, UI changes should be done only if they reduce the number of steps to perform some task and/or make getting desired information faster. Discourse doesn't pass those tests, so changing just for style's sake is at best neutral, and more likely is a negative.
That said - the text editor is better, but still has its quirks...
@Lorne_Kates said:
It only shows "hours/days" ago
This also adds useless computational complexity to the whole thing, because some computer somewhere has to continuously do all that complex subtraction math and imposes a need to refresh the view. Simply showing the post time & date avoids that nonsense.
But, then again, I am a simplicity advocate...
@morbiuswilters said:
So too_many_userna is the same as too_many_usernames, who is also the same as anotherusername?@anotherusername said:
Nope, I'm just myself and nobody else is me.
I confirm: I am not anotherusername.
It would violate the Geneva Helvetica Convention.
My kingdom for a serif!
EDIT: Ooh fun! font changes don't carry across quotes. I'm sure I just repeated something others have already noted...
Keep in mind: Chrome is the last FOSS project I like. So if I lose Chrome, I will be like the main character in one of those 70s NYC movies where the guy's entire family is killed by muggers. I will have nothing left to lose; not even a tenuous connection to the world of the living; any and all decency stripped from my soul.
(It's not 1970s or NYC though)
There's a window of 3 days (configurable) after account creation where users can change their own name. After that it becomes an admin task (I think/hope - hence my PM to you yesterday.)
I still can't add those last three letters to my username - what's the ETA for the length increase?
Man On The Silver Mountain is one of my favorite songs.
I think the realistic expectation would be to have the same character limit that the CS system had, so we can have the same usernames we used to have.
It's not that difficult, people... (or at least, it shouldn't be...)
Also: changing pages is fast. Scrolling is slow - especially when trying to relocate previous information. Computers are supposed to free us from physical constraints like having to pass through all points between two others - scrolling eliminates that "I can go from item 1 to item 9 million without having to pass through all the other ones in between" advantage.
The short name is the unique username in the system.
You mean the one that is broken because it only allows 15 characters? Technology is supposed to make things better, not worse!
Edit: Also, if the short name is the "system wide unique" name, why on earth is it editable in the user preferences? Shouldn't it be fixed at account creation time? (Of course, that explains the warning you get about if you change it, it will break @name stuff... I really can't comprehend the thought process behind that design decision.)
The long name is not system wide unique though, what if "Bob Marley" and "Bob Marley" have the same password, which "Bob Marley" do we log in?
What? You mean unlike every other system* in the universe, "first come first serve, suck it!" doesn't apply to usernames on discourse? At the very least, put that in giant bold letters on the create an account/forgot password thing.
Put another way: if the user name isn't unique, WTF is the point of having it? "Bob Marley" is a name, not a username... seriously....I'm beginning to think that the world really did hit its peak for just about everything in the 1990s and is now in its long decline.
*Possibly a slight hyperbole. And holy crap, have I gotten curmudgeonly in the past few days...
Is that guy in Nagesh's post wearing a sash that has a fish impaled on a spear? Awesome...