Frist! And Welcome

mott555

Yeah, I dislike how many modern webapps are hostile to tabs. I don't want to navigate around your single-page app like the Web was only a way to serve up standalone, clunky Java applets with really poor color contrast.

Agreed. I'm an obsessive MIDDLE-CLICK-ALL-THE-LINKS guy and I'm encountering more and more websites where they break middle-clicking so I have to left-click, visit the new page in my current tab, and lose my place.

mikeTheLiar

@moderator said:

What I'm looking for is the analogue / improvement upon the Not Read page from CS. The Latest tab is the closest I've seen, but I'm not in love of the performance of middle-clicking a bunch of them to work through, which is my -- and I appreciate how ludicrous it is to use this phrase -- workflow on TDWTF.

You're not alone. I do this too.

morbiuswilters

@moderator said:

80x25 characters ought to be enough for any website.

On the bright side, the next Twitter release will support TSR so you can be notified of any new tweets while using Instagram's CLI.

moderator

@morbiuswilters said:

TSR

How to Tell You're a Nerd #2503: When your immediate response halfway through the sentence is, "'support TSR?' Gygax and Arneson are both dead."

error

@moderator said:

How to Tell You're a Nerd #2503: When your immediate response halfway through the sentence is, "'support TSR?' Gygax and Arneson are both dead."

And knowing about Terminate and Stay Resident is less nerdy?

moderator

@error said:

And knowing about Terminate and Stay Resident is less nerdy?

No. I just didn't make that association until I got to the CLI reference at the end. My mind jumped first to D&D.

skotl

Indeed. That's why I think the 4 minute default does not align with how people (like me!) would expect the site to behave.
So a good idea, either poorly implemented or poorly configured.

skotl

Crap. Another one. I had 19 unread posts on this page, responded to one, 18 posts up and now I'm at the end and have lost my place - need to scroll back up to try and remember where I last was.

morbiuswilters

@skotl said:

Crap. Another one. I had 19 unread posts on this page, responded to one, 18 posts up and now I'm at the end and have lost my place - need to scroll back up to try and remember where I last was.

Yeah, that kind of gets on my nerves, too. On CS, I would just open "Reply" in a new tab for anything I was replying to, so my original window would keep my place on the page.

sam

This is an interesting problem not sure how we would solve it. If we let you keep your place you could get super confused and think the post did not work.

skotl

It's going to get super-annoying on much larger and active threads, too. If I come back after a couple of days and want to respond to something ~100 posts farther up, I'd likely lose the will to live trying to recover my place in that and other threads.

Is the answer not to post the response under/inside the post that I responded to, and return me to there? That would be kinda neat.

skotl

Unrelated question - are Morbs and Sam based in the UK/Europe, or do you just not sleep?

Zecc

@codinghorror said:

Note that iBooks added a continuous scroll mode.

@The onebox said:

Here's how to enable it.

So it's not on by default? I wonder why.

Seriously though, I kind of like infinite scrolling. But... it's got problems.

@moderator said:

The funny thing is, it's seems faster to users to load a whole new page, rather than to AJAXify pages, and swap them in-place.

There's this navigation style where the person loads a bunch of pages in background tabs, so that when they're done reading one the next they switch to is already loaded.

If the number of posts loaded per AJAX request is smaller the posts shown in a static page, it does make browsing slower because you have to manually trigger and wait for a larger number of requests. If it is the same, the number of requests you trigger is the same (so no difference there), but if you switch to another tab you lose the visual indication that loading has finished (I think?).

@morbiuswilters said:

Yeah, I dislike how many modern webapps are hostile to tabs.

This. So much.

I don't know how the site tracks how much a person has spent on a topic. Do you take into consideration whether the page is the foreground?

sam

Nahh ... hidden settings are much easier to change than that:

./launcher ssh app
rails c
SiteSetting.max_username_length = 20

If you edit files it will be burnt next time you update discourse.

PJH

Unfortunately @sam,

I don't have console access to the server,
everything I know intimately about RoR could be written on the back of a postage stamp, and
you brought up my third objection - it's not permanent...

dtech

@codinghorror said:

>> dtech said:

I think it's too heavily influenced by Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood's former pet project before he moved to Discourse. Stack Overflow though, actually improved over what it was copying.

Since the main objection seems to be infinite pagination, see:

The End of Pagination

I read that shortly after you posted it, and I mostly agree with you: pagination interrupts the reader flow. I do not agree with you that infinite scrolling is the answer to that issue, or that the issue is so large that it needs to be fixed

But more importantly, the post you replied to was about how discourse makes it extremely hard to follow a topic if it splits off into little subdiscussions (as every topic with >~20 replies does), because of the flat view and broken replying/quoting system (e.g. no nested quotes).

I notice this splitting into subdiscussions a lot on forums (at least on technical ones like Reddit, hacker news or this one) and it comes as no surprise to me that those forums usually abandon the flat-list model and use a threaded one.
These kind of subdiscussion are not impossible is in a flat-list model, and are greatly supported by features such as nested quoting and keeping track of replies. 2 things that discourse now either does not do or does it buggy/suboptimal.

sam

I am sure @apapadimoulis can sort it out then :) though I would not recommend setting it to 255, especially here.

end

@dtech said:

because of the flat view and broken replying/quoting system (e.g. no nested quotes).

There are in fact nested quotes, simply expand the above quote by clicking/tapping where it says "dtech said".

You'll note that my quote is there inside your quote.

Should there be infinitely nested quotes? That's a different question.

dtech

Discourse "nested" quotes:
@codinghorror said:

There are in fact nested quotes, simply expand the above quote by clicking/tapping where it says "dtech said".

Nested quotes: (albeit not a fully good example, as these are built manually as don't have full styling)

dtech: discourse has no nested quotes

codinghorror: There are in fact nested quotes, simply expand the above quote by clicking/tapping where it says "dtech said".

I do not think that allowing the user to expand the full quoted post (including previously quoted post) is a replacement for nested quotes.

Infinite nested quoting is probably not a good idea, but 2-3 levels are not outrageous.

boomzilla

@codinghorror said:

Should there be infinitely nested quotes? That's a different question.

What's the argument for an arbitrary limit? Does the implementation language not have something like a while loop?

Nagesh

@sam said:

This is an interesting problem not sure how we would solve it. If we let you keep your place you could get super confused and think the post did not work.

What happens if I have 2000 posts to catch up? People are on some kind of posting frenzy and that is what is causing conversation to get lost. I only made that comment already here.
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/the-bad-ideas-thread/254/31?u=nagesh

moderator

@boomzilla said:

Does the implementation language not have something like a while loop?

Creating forum software with a Turing-complete language is for pussies. The Discourse team really took the GOTO Considered Harmful mentality to heart. They only code in assembly and refuse to use jumps.

ender

@codinghorror said:

Arbitrarily forcing users finding a tiny "next page" button every 20 posts is the very definition of that.

That's why you make the spacebar automatically move to the next page when you reach the end of current page (which you also reached simply by pressing the spacebar).

ender

@blakeyrat said:

The Kindle is certainly technologically capable of displaying any book as a single long column of infinitely scrolling text. But it doesn't do that

That's actually an interesting point - I do quite a bit of reading on my PC (including books), and I actually prefer the paginated style that all the programs I use do - none of them allow you to scroll by an arbitrary amount, it's always a full page (what a "page" is, depends on the program and file format - with e-books it's defined by the window size, while PDFs are limited to whatever the creator used).

BTW, before books were invented, texts were often written in what's basically an infinite-scroll media - scrolls. I wonder why they were replaced by books?

morbiuswilters

@ender said:

BTW, before books were invented, texts were often written in what's basically an infinite-scroll media - scrolls. I wonder why they were replaced by books?

It was a conspiracy by the Page-Industrial Complex to deny people their birthright of infinite scrolling.

Seriously, though, can you imagine how many rules God would have made if he hadn't been constrained to two stone "pages"?

HardwareGeek

@ender said:

BTW, before books were invented, texts were often written in what's basically an infinite-scroll media - scrolls. I wonder why they were replaced by books?

Now, in 2014, Discourse brings you the latest in 3000 year-old technology!

dhromed

@ender said:

That's why you make the spacebar automatically move to the next page when you reach the end of current page

Wait, there are forums that implement this?
Spacebar already performs a page-down. Don't you see a tiny conflict there?

dhromed

@morbiuswilters said:

Seriously, though, can you imagine how many rules God would have made if he hadn't been constrained to two stone "pages"?

You'd think you'd read to the end and then two more stones would fall from the sky. Bad times.

morbiuswilters

@dhromed said:

You'd think you'd read to the end and then two more stones would fall from the sky. Bad times.

"Wait, what was that one about coveting my neighbor's wife's ass? I need a little context here..

Commandment 3721 of 2948? What??"

Filed under: The worst part is when God takes away your moderator privileges and makes you wander in the desert for 40 years..

dhromed

Maybe if the bible was infiniscroll, people would stop reading it.

ender

@dhromed said:

Spacebar already performs a page-down. Don't you see a tiny conflict there?

Not at all. I think newsreaders implemented this first, but most e-mail clients also support it: spacebar first scrolls the text of current message; when you get to the end, spacebar jumps to the next unread message automatically (and then you can use spacebar to scroll the message text again). Opera implemented this on webpages (it uses meta [or maybe link? not sure] tags when they're present, and some heuristics when they aren't to determine what next/previous page should be); and guess what - this works with CS.

morbiuswilters

@dhromed said:

Maybe if the bible was infiniscroll, people would stop reading it.

And look:

A false god of gold!

dhromed

@ender said:

Opera implemented this on webpages (it uses meta [or maybe link? not sure] tags when they're present, and some heuristics when they aren't to determine what next/previous page should be); and guess what - this works with CS.

Pretty cool.

I think Opera has always been the one and only browser to actually use those meta navigation tag. It used to even have a navigation bar.

HardwareGeek

@morbiuswilters said:

Nagesh, your eye thing is creeping me out.

What is it with him and eyes? Is he Sauron's ~~cousin~~ ~~bastard~~ love-child, or something?

BTW, Discourse's search feature is unreliable. I searched for "eye". It found posts with "keep an eye on," "eyesight" and , but not "your eye thing".

oesor

Note that iBooks added an option for it.

Edit: Jesus how the fuck do I get back to where I was reading?

end

Search for iBooks.

(But in general I would avoid replying until you're done reading, the editor docks at the bottom of the browser, and will even work across clicking links to other topics.)

HardwareGeek

@oesor said:

how the fuck do I get back to where I was reading?

It's easy, but only if you quote text from the post you're replying to. If you just comment without quoting, you're SOL.

Oh, yeah. Click on the up arrow by the quoted text.

awesomerobot

This demo has both pagination and infinite scrolling.

Items

What utility is the pagination providing aside from progress indication? Do people remember which page of a thread a comment was made? (I'm actually asking that, because I generally don't.)

In long threads I generally find myself thinking "well, I think the post I want to see was in the beginning of the thread... and then I click on page 2... well no maybe it was on page 3... well it's not here so maybe I should check 2 again... isn't that effectively just scrubbing through a topic and at that point isn't pagination just a barrier to scrolling?

end

And just a reminder, if you know it was something someone posted, click their avatar, and filter the topic to just that person's posts. Two clicks / taps.

Search also prioritizes in topic results, provided the search was initiated from a topic that is more than 10 posts long.

oesor

@codinghorror said:

And just a reminder, if you know it was something someone posted, click their avatar, and filter the topic to just that person's posts. Two clicks / taps.

Such a brave new world, when previously I could hit the back button. One click / tap.

moderator

I am amused by the number of TDWTF forum lurkers/infrequent posters who have come after Discourse with guns blazing. If nothing else, it's bringing us together as a community.

awesomerobot

So say you've read 10 pages. To find a post you read at the beginning of those 10 pages... unless you remembered the specific page or made a lucky guess you'd click scroll click scroll click scroll; isn't infinite scrolling just getting rid of the clicks?

oesor

@awesomerobot said:

So say you've read 10 pages. To find a post you read at the beginning of those 10 pages... unless you remembered the specific page or made a lucky guess you'd click scroll click scroll click scroll; isn't infinite scrolling just getting rid of the clicks?

I'm not trying to find some random post; I'm trying to resume my reading from the point where I decided to drop a steaming nugget of wisdom on the thread.

morbiuswilters

@moderator said:

I am amused by the number of TDWTF forum lurkers/infrequent posters who have come after Discourse with guns blazing. If nothing else, it's bringing us together as a community.

Just like the pogroms brought together Russian villages!

Filed under: Godwin'd That For You

oesor

@moderator said:

I am amused by the number of TDWTF forum lurkers/infrequent posters who have come after Discourse with guns blazing. If nothing else, it's bringing us together as a community.

It's funny, I was actually on a website with comments that were infinite scrolling and it was a total pain in the ass to use. I was thinking to myself in the thirty seconds I gave scrolling through it with UI elements fading in all over the place and not being able to scan through the replies because the browser scroll bar was all herky-jerky that it was the most obnoxious example of web 3.0 mental masturbation I've seen yet.

Then this forum starts up and I recognize the green scroll thing that popped up in the corner and realized retroactively it was Discourse.

(And yeah, total lurker.)

morbiuswilters

@oesor said:

I'm not trying to find some random post; I'm trying to resume my reading from the point where I decided to drop a steaming nugget of wisdom on the thread.

Who are you?

oesor

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/members/oesor.aspx

Filed under Who? Who? Who? Who?

ben_lubar

@awesomerobot said:

This demo has both pagination and infinite scrolling.

Items

And Home/End don't work. Nice!

ben_lubar

@oesor said:

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/members/oesor.aspx

So you've made over twice as many posts here as you had on the old forum, but you somehow are more used to the old forum's method of posting?

morbiuswilters

@oesor said:

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/members/oesor.aspx

Filed under Who? Who? Who? Who?

Ah, you're the guy who said "The real WTF is writing your own config parser" after I already had said it on that Perl WTF.