Vote of No Confidence
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How does it know?
That is one good question. I suppose it is having some kind of algorithm to cover max number of users, max un-linked replies or maybe it is just random. If it is random, then that is sad. An algorithm could explain a few things.
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"Summarize" only starts working on topics with 50+ posts, but it's only useful if the topic hasn't derailed?
Maybe the OMGWTFBBQ 3 contest can be a prize for the 50th post in a non-derailed sidebar
threadtopic.Filed under: Mug
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Endless scrolling is just evil. To the point where I'm not even going to bother trying to read the entire thread before replying because of how much I hate endless scrolling.
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Maybe the OMGWTFBBQ 3 contest can be a prize for the 50th post in a non-derailed sidebar
threadtopic.How many OT posts does it take before a
threadtopic is considered derailed?Filed under: Odds of winning depend on the number of entrants
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Maybe the OMGWTFBBQ 3 contest can be a prize for the 50th post in a non-derailed sidebar threadtopic.
There are no winners in a thread not derailed.
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There are no winners in a
FTFYthread not derailedthing that cannot exist.
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this thread is now about derailleurs
discuss
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this thread is now about derailleurs
discuss
This thread is now about fixies.
This thread is now about pixies.
This thread is now about The Pixies.
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this thread is now about derailleurs
Disraeli Gears is a classic album.
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This thread is now about fixies.
This thread is now about pixies.
This thread is now about The Pixies.
at what point does a derailment of a derailment of a derailment require moderator attention?
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I like the endless scrolling, esp on mobile. That's a pretty minor gripe
Major, major disagree. Myself and several other users have stated that endless scrolling is a deal-breaker. Put as simply as possible: endless scrolling = I stop using the forums. I can't stand them, they make reading long threads nearly impossible, they make browsing through ANY thread annoying because expected behavior of scroll bars is broken. It is literally one of the worst trends in UI/UX at the moment-- and it's a subset of "everything is mobile/a phone" which is literally THE worst UI/UX trend in web design.If the styling isn't going to be fixed, I can write a stylesheet to fix it. It'll take me hours that I would rather not spend, but I can do it. The current design has way to much whitespace, zero differentiation between posts, too much junk icons and crap. It's nigh unreadable.
If you aren't going to import the old posts, fine. It's effectively giving a "screw you" to the community who put a lot of time and effort into making the forums a fun place, but it can be rebuilt by whoever decides to stick around.BUT-- if you keep endless scrolling, there's no way to fix that. It's telling the forum users "sure, you guys are the ones who have spent thousands of hours here and you're the primary users, but I, someone who has no stake in posting to the forum, kinda likes this one thing that you all hate, so suck it up and live with it". It's pretty much textbook "how to kill a community" there.
Regardless, unless someone else is wiling to reimplement the sidebar, comments, and feature comment integrations, get hosting, backups, all those things, then this is what we have.
No. Please, just plain no. What we have is a fully usable forum in the form of CS. It works, it's fully populated, and the few WYSIWYG bugs have been worked around by literally every single new user who has ever posted more than once. Don't take that away until and unless you have a fully implemented forum that has 100% of the functionality of the one being replaced. It just isn't good enough to say "here's something broken that half the community can't use and the other half won't use". It will kill the forums DEAD. Straight up, dead. This happens over and over and over again these days, and is one of the biggest WTF a company can do. "Fuck the users, here's a UI/UX redesign that adds nothing, takes away a lot, and what little new stuff there is no one wants". BAM userbase gone, product dead. Alex, straight talk here-- your entire business model-- your entire philosophy on life, is teaching software people to avoid WTFs. I'm telling you, going with this new forum as it is is a huge, massive, pinned-to-the-front-page worthy WTF. Don't do it. Until and unless someone brings it 100% up to snuff, don't do it. And if there isn't anyone who can do it-- or if there isn't the time or budget to do it-- then don't do it. Good effort, wasn't there, project cancelled, business as usual.
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@Lorne_Kates One person who is going by user handle of moderator has already decided to migrate all our posts. So your content will live in this system.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Endless scrolling is a deal-breaker. Put as simply as possible: endless scrolling = I stop using the forums. I can't stand them, they make reading long threads nearly impossible, they make browsing through ANY thread annoying because expected behavior of scroll bars is broken. It is literally one of the worst trends in UI/UX at the moment-- and it's a subset of "everything is mobile/a phone" which is literally THE worst UI/UX trend in web design.
I don't know if this is a fad/trend/whatever, but it's the way a lot of stuff is going now. If it's going to be the future of everything, then browsers will support it, and you'll just have to get used to it.
If this is just a passing thing, then I'm confident the Discourse folks will add paging in. This is their full-time job. They're committed to making this software the best thing since, uh, phpBB?Also, who knows, maybe someone already submitted a patch for it? "How hard could it be"?
@Lorne_Kates said:
If the styling isn't going to be fixed, I can write a stylesheet to fix it. It'll take me hours that I would rather not spend, but I can do it.
Please, please, please. This whole thing is a volunteer/community effort.
@Lorne_Kates said:
What we have is a fully usable forum in the form of CS. It works, it's fully populated, and the few WYSIWYG bugs have been worked around by literally every single new user who has ever posted more than once. Don't take that away until and unless you have a fully implemented forum that has 100% of the functionality of the one being replaced.
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? What if no software has 100% of the functionality of the functionality? Do we just go George RR Martin and say, fuck it, I'll stick with WordStar on DOS?
OK, that was rhetorical. I don't want to stick with CS, and i think it's time came years ago.
@Lorne_Kates said:
"Fuck the users, here's a UI/UX redesign that adds nothing, takes away a lot, and what little new stuff there is no one wants"
We're losing stuff, sure, but I really think Discourse adds a lot of features. I just replied to a post via email. That's pretty cool. There are a lot more features.
@Lorne_Kates said:
Don't do it. Until and unless someone brings it 100% up to snuff, don't do it.
It's gotta happen, and it's not going to be 100%. This is TDWTF's tenth year and I'm committed to doing a major site redesign. Part of that is doing away with the comment system (i.e. making it forums-based), which inevitably leads us to here.
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Endless scrolling is just evil. To the point where I'm not even going to bother trying to read the entire thread before replying because of how much I hate endless scrolling.
What would be the point in waiting to reply? Once you see a post you want to reply to, the odds of finding it again with endless scrolling are inversely proportional to the length of the thread. On a thread like this, your odds are already pretty low. Imagine how hard it would be to find a post a second time on a thread that's got a thousand, or more, posts. Not to mention the way that the end of the thread actively updates with new posts. If you wait until you read every post on the thread, your replies would likely get interrupted by the need to read new posts coming in.
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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...
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If this is just a passing thing, then I'm confident the Discourse folks will add paging in.
Not before it drives everybody away from this forum in droves. And probably not even then. It's a religious belief.
BTW, what part of the massive bugginess is the browser's responsibility to solve? The browser's doing everything a browser's supposed to be doing. The bugginess is all in Discourse. EDIT: and a lot of the bugginess is them bypassing ancient working features of the browser, like being able to search for text on a page.
This is their full-time job.
That's embarrassing. If that's true, they need to hire a full-time tester, because damn.
Please, please, please. This whole thing is a volunteer/community effort.
I thought it was a beta. Or is it not a beta anymore? Now it's a "community effort"? So what does that imply? Is there a source control repo? A proper bug tracker?
Maybe spend a couple paragraphs explaining what we're doing here. Based on your past comment about this being a beta, for all I know you're still planning to wipe the DB. They usually do that when betas end.
Nobody knows what's going on. The communication has been atrocious from day one.
What if no software has 100% of the functionality
vBulletin and PhpBB do right now. That's the exact point I was making when I posted this thread. vBulletin and PhpBB are old also, but they're supported and they fucking work in a way Discourse isn't even remotely close to. You just didn't bother evaluating them because: 1) they're in PHP/Linux, and 2) you don't have good buddy-pals working on them.
Well 1) I see as moot because this is written in Ruby in Linux and I don't see how that's at all better, and 2) I see as moot because your buddy-pals, and let's be frank here, aren't very good at writing software.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Major, major disagree. Myself and several other users have stated that endless scrolling is a deal-breaker. Put as simply as possible: endless scrolling = I stop using the forums. I can't stand them, they make reading long threads nearly impossible, they make browsing through ANY thread annoying because expected behavior of scroll bars is broken. It is literally one of the worst trends in UI/UX at the moment-- and it's a subset of "everything is mobile/a phone" which is literally THE worst UI/UX trend in web design.
I have to agree with @Lorne_Kates on this one. The endless scrolling is a horrid infection that is spreading across the UX/UI world. I'll admit, there are some places where it makes sense. For instance, Pintrest and Facebook. On Pintrest, when browsing through pins, you are literally looking at a vast pool of independent posts, that follow a common theme. On Facebook, your newsfeed is showing you things that are happening in your friends' lives, and the posts don't generally have any interconnection.On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where the continuous scrolling is being used as nothing more than "Hey, look what we can do!" Take as examples MSN and Discourse. On MSN, you click a link to go to one of their articles, get to the end, and it adds another article to the bottom of the page. Generally, they're good about making the article related, but sometimes, it's totally random. Like today, I read an article about what's happening in Thailand, and the followup article it gave me was on some lady who murdered her kids. Not really the type of news I was looking for. On Discourse, the posts are all connected together by the thread, but navigating within a thread is practically impossible because of the continuous scrolling. want to review what a specific post said. Well, if the thread is still short, go for it. Thread's already in the hundreds of posts range? Then you're probably out of luck.
In short, I agree with @Lorne_Kates: Continuous scrolling does no belong in a forum. From what I've seen so far, a lot of other users agree. Unfortunately for us, @apapadimoulis doesn't care. Apparently he has his mind made up, and screw what the user base thinks.
@apapadimoulis: The name of this thread, and the fact that it is the second largest thread in the Discourse based forum should indicate to you that something is wrong with your choice in new forum software.
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What would be the point in waiting to reply? Once you see a post you want to reply to, the odds of finding it again with endless scrolling are inversely proportional to the length of the thread. On a thread like this, your odds are already pretty low. Imagine how hard it would be to find a post a second time on a thread that's got a thousand, or more, posts. Not to mention the way that the end of the thread actively updates with new posts. If you wait until you read every post on the thread, your replies would likely get interrupted by the need to read new posts coming in.
Yes even now I feel that this software needs better search system integrated. I am seeing my posts under "Preferences" and I am not able to find everything I posted. then again, that also happening on the main site. So tough love to me.
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Please, please, please. This whole thing is a volunteer/community effort.
Alex. I keep hearing you say this. I'm a full time professional tech lead/web developer for a multi-nationally recognized brand (you know which one, I'm in your LinkedIn network). I would love to contribute. I was adding in tons of missing functionality on CS with Greasemonkey scripts on my local machine. But the avenue for contributing to this is not clear to me at all.
Where is your repository? Can I submit a pull request (to your project, not the upstream Discourse project)? How would I go about submitting CSS fixes etc?
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Things that are open betas usually have the word "beta" on them somewhere. And the email invitation to them says clearly that they are beta.
Alex's post here is the first time I've heard of this being a beta. And I still don't know the implications of that-- does that mean these posts will be wiped? Does it mean only a limited set of DailyWTF posters were invited here? What does that mean exactly?
It's not limited. I signed up with a new account (I'm really PedanticCurmudgeon).
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On most forums, I'd check the last page or two of a long thread to see what the current conversation is before jumping in and posting something that may very well have already been discussed.
Something that isn't really practical (or even possible in long threads) with an endless scrolling setup.
Heck, the only* reason I'm replying to a post now is because it arrived in my inbox (alongside a bunch of unrelated replies).
*(Also, what's with the "sometimes maybe Markup sometimes not" thing going on in posts?)
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It's not limited.
I gather the notification was limited, possibly intentionally, possibly just do the less-than-smooth database import. However, registration is unrestricted.I'm really PedanticCurmudgeon
I like your old name better — more descriptive.
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Also, what's with the "sometimes maybe Markup sometimes not" thing going on in posts?
I'm not sure what you're talking about, unless you're referring to quoted text. Discourse breaks formatting inside quoted text. Sometimes it just displays as plain text; sometimes it escapes the original markup so that it is visible. If quoted text has any formatting; it's because the quoter fixed it manually.
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How does it know?
Easy. If the thread's here and has more than 5 posts, it's been derailed. Next question please.
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Easy. If the thread's here and has more than 5 posts, it's been derailed. Next question please.
I can think of one monster thread that has thousands of posts and remained relatively on-topic the entire time.
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I can think of one monster thread that has thousands of posts and remained relatively on-topic the entire time.
Yeah, I was thinking of that, too. But does that really count? I mean, it's not a normal discussion thread. The OP posts an update, one or two users poke fun at him, to which he seems completely oblivious, then the thread is dead until the next time the OP posts an update.
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Yeah, I was thinking of that, too. But does that really count? I mean, it's not a normal discussion thread. The OP posts an update, one or two users poke fun at him, to which he seems completely oblivious, then the thread is dead until the next time the OP posts an update.
If you are talking about SSDS thread, I have killed it.
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I gather the notification was limited, possibly intentionally, possibly just do the less-than-smooth database import. However, registration is unrestricted.
It was also limited because of who @apapadimoulis chose to try to port over. According to what he said yesterday in the Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server thread on the CS forum:
@apapadimoulis said:The only reason I wanted to import in the first place was to "protect" wellknown usernames from being snipped by someone being obnoxious.
From what anyone could tell, that was based on some post count cutoff. So if you had a lot of posts just because you'd been around since the early days, but no one really knew who you were, he tried to port you over. If you hadn't been around long, but managed to make a name for yourself, you might not have been ported because your post count was too low.
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Also, what's with this shit about not being able to have nested quotes? When I tried to nest @antiquarian's quote inside of @HardwareGeek's (in my last post) the open quote tag showed up, and then is closed the main quote at the end of the inner quote. This totally kills the context in some cases.
And then it tells me that "new users" can only mention two users in a post. What kind of screwed up limitation is that?
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Discourse has taken new approach to multi-quote.
Also, what's with this shit about not being able to have nested quotes? When I tried to nest @antiquarian's quote inside of @HardwareGeek's (in my last post) the open quote tag showed up, and then is closed the main quote at the end of the inner quote. This totally kills the context in some cases.
And then it tells me that "new users" can only mention two users in a post. What kind of screwed up limitation is that?
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And then it tells me that "new users" can only mention two users in a post. What kind of screwed up limitation is that?
Assuming that new users are scum to be treated with derision is Discourse's best feature.
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Assuming that new users are scum to be treated with derision is Discourse's best feature.
Again please read the Cathedral and the Bazaar a very nice book by ESR.
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Assuming that new users are scum to be treated with derision is Discourse's best feature.
I also don't see the problem here.
Filed Under: [I treat everyone as scum worthy of derision.](#tag)
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Spoken like a true politician, Nagesh.
You can't multi-quote around here because Mr. Atwood cannot think of a situation in which you would ever want or need to multi-quote. Seriously, that's the reason.
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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.
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Again please read the Cathedral and the Bazaar a very nice book by ESR.
This is a silly comment for a variety of reasons. Most important among them is that it's a terrible book, both in terms of content and writing style.
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It keeps telling me there are unread posts in this thread no matter how many times I read them.
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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.
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.
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Clicking the "last page" link then scrolling to the bottom of that page in a traditional browser is faster than scrolling to the bottom of a topic in Discourse.
EDIT: I guess I can just hit End to go to the bottom, but I have 15 years of muscle memory working against that.
Serious feature request: can you add a thing to the "scroll" box so that I can type a post number in and it will go to that one? That would alleviate a good number of the complaints, I think.
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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.
Seriously? You seriously don't know why one would, perhaps, want to jump to the top or bottom of page 2 of 4?
Also: highlight-to-quote was beautiful in CS. I only just discovered it exists in Discourse, and it doesn't even work well. For example, I tried to highlight your post. CS kept the "reply to post" in a nice highly padded and self-contained element. Discourse makes me highlight the forum text. Do you know how how it is to highlight a paragraph that starts with "I"? Either I'd underselect by a pixel, and it wouldn't get the "I". or I'd oversleect, and because the layout is stupid, it highlights your username and a bunch of other screen stuff. And when that happens, the "Reply with Quote" hovertext doesn't even show up.
At least CS, if you over selected, would pop up an error "Dude, only select from the reply!". UX feedback, what a twist. =(
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Thats a minor gripe, the widget is telling you where you are at. heck I cant even see scrollbars on osx most of the time.
Clicking the "last page" link then scrolling to the bottom of that page in a traditional browser is faster than scrolling to the bottom of a topic in Discourse.
click the down arrow on the widget takes you to bottom
Serious feature request: can you add a thing to the "scroll" box so that I can type a post number in and it will go to that one? That would alleviate a good number of the complaints, I think.
totally open to adding keyboard shortcuts
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Serious feature request: can you add a thing to the "scroll" box so that I can type a post number in and it will go to that one? That would alleviate a good number of the complaints, I think.
That's assuming that you know which post number you want to go to.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Seriously? You seriously don't know why one would, perhaps, want to jump to the top or bottom of page 2 of 4?
yeah, why? give me a real example.
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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)
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That's assuming that you know which post number you want to go to.
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.
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heck I cant even see scrollbars on osx most of the time.
I never even use OSX most of the time (it's been years), and I see scroll bars all the time.
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yeah, why? give me a real example.
Earlier on in this thread there were comments about what a fail continuous scrolling is. I believe that those comments were initiated by @Lorne_Kates, and I know I contributed to them. Whether it was @Lorne_Kates or not, someone commented how you can't really read the whole thread, then go back and comment on the posts you found interesting when you have a continuous scrolling environment. I completely agree, the main reason being that it's just too difficult to find the post(s) you want to reply to again. And you might want to read the entire thread so that you can see if anyone else has already made the comments you were planning to, or if the thread has already taken an entirely different turn. Having pages instead of continual scrolling makes it much easier to go back and find a specific post again, for whatever reason.
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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?
