Vote of No Confidence
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Fuck infinite scrolling and fuck Discourse. It's barely been a day I can stand this piece of crap.
@Lorne_Kates s morphing into @blakeyrat
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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...
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Trying to appease both sides, while possibly gathering hate from both instead: how about infinite scrolling of pages?
I mean, besides having "42 of 404" (and assuming 20 posts per page), you'd have also have "(page 3 of 21)" on the progress not-a-scrollbar.
Clicking on the center of the progress not-a-scrollbar would pop up a list of the pages, with the current page clearly highlighted.
Clicking on eg. page 14 would load posts 261 to 280, plus a few posts from the end of page 13.
You feel like it, go nuts with a fast animation of the new page sliding in from below (or equivalently, the viewport scrolling down).Scrolling would seamlessly load posts as before, but the divider between posts of different pages would be differentiated in a subtle but noticeable way, like a slight thicker horizontal line.
What do you guys think?
I think you're on to something here, but I'd take it just a tad further.
So, you're at the begging of the topic. For calculation simplicity, let's say we only have 10 posts per page, and, by default, 20 posts are loaded in memory at any time. On the top there's a div with "Page 1" written in it.
So you're scrolling down, and in between posts 10 and 11, there's the separator div with text "Page 2". As you scroll down, the Page 1 separator moves to the top of the content area and is anchored there. Then, as soon as the page 2 separator "hits" it, page 1 collapses and posts can be unloaded from memory and page 3 can be loaded (tweak timings as necessary). Rinse and repeat. So as you scroll down, you get new page separators and they keep stacking at the top, as you scroll up the old ones expand again. You could have all the pages stacked at the bottom from the very start as well.
Of course, clicking any of the separators can expand that page again.
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OK, good way of putting it -- I think i get it. Finally. The scrollbar and pagination serve as a relative indicator, that shows where you are on the page/conversation. You're right, we all use that without realizing it.
That's one of my central points there. Forum software as it is now is the end result of DECADES of user interface and user interaction design. This is prototypical "reinventing the wheel" stuff here. The reason why paging works and is used nearly everywhere is because it's the best way given human physiology and psychology-- and given the capabilities of our technology-- and the way we interact with it. Sure, there may be better ways-- but just throwing it all out wholesale and hoping the new thing is better isn't the way to do it.
I'm finding myself slowly using that green X/Y thingy to serve the same purpose.
I personally don't use it, or even notice it at all. It's too far in my periphery. When I'm reading, my centre-vision (that picks up color, detail, information) is focused on the words on the screen. The green thing when it does register is just a blob in the bottom corner. In most cases it doesn't register at all because:
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there is little or no color vision in the periphery. The green is light. It literally fades away and I can't see it
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edge vision is really, really REALLY good at picking up movement and change. It's a survival thing. It's why things in the corner of your eye that blink or move are distracting. Millions of years of evolution at work there. The green thing in the corner doesn't move or change (except for the, as per #1, invisible numbers). So it doesn't convey any information to me about my progress through a discussion. A scrollbar, by contrast, is a simple, straight, high-contrast feedback mechanism. The position indicator is highly visible by being dark against light. It is moving in the corner of my eye so I can always detect my progress and even gage my speed of progression without even looking at it.
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the green widget thing has text. X/Y. So I can't just glance at it. I have to LOOK at it, read the information and do math to figure out where I am. Just how far is 143/642 anyways? Here, try this. Find a wooden table of an arbitrary length. Place a WTF Mug on it, anywhere on it. Grab someone from the hallway, tell them to close their eyes. Point them at the table so they're perpendicular to the length. Tell them to briefly open and close their eyes. Now ask them to give you an APPROXIMATE FRACTION that is how far along the length of the table the mug is. They'll all be able to give you a reasonably accurate answer, probably narrowing it down to which quarter it's in. You can press the issue and ask them to be more precise, they probably will be up to which 1/16th it's in.
Next, grab someone else. Bring them into the room. Give them all the time they want to look at the table. Then come up with an arbitrary fraction, and ask them to put the mug that far along the table. They'll all hesitate. They'll look at the table for a moment, slowly approach it, stop again and hesitate. Finally they'll put down the mug somewhere, ponder, and possibly move the mug again. If the fraction is really simple, like say "1/4", they might be accurate. If the fraction you give them is 17/47, they won't be very close.
And it will take someone orders of magnitude longer to perform the "fraction => mug" operation than "mug => fraction". Like, the first person will be done in a blink of an eye and maybe a thought. The second person will takes seconds to complete the task (even if you factor out the physical acts of picking up the mug, walking to table, etc).
So while the green box is a very useful piece of ADDITIONAL and EXACT information, it isn't a replacement for the scrollbar. Too much psychology and rock-solid UX at work to replace it.
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Lorne, I think you're overselling your point here. It's not about human psychology or cognition. The stuff about human vision, while true, strikes me at an attempt to rationalize a visceral reaction. Not that I don't disagree with the larger point that the progress bar isn't useful. Here's my take:
I've done some hard thinking about the infinite scrolling in the past few days. It was nagging me that, despite my strong preference for it, I couldn't identify the key advantage, the silver bullet. But I've finally come to a conclusion: pagination is better because it works. It's better because it doesn't break the way I interact with my browser, it's better because things behave in a way that is consistent and immediately understood, it's better because I can use it and barely notice it.
I know you're thinking that this is an obvious conclusion, and I must be an idiot to have taken five days to put it into words. But you miss my point: the above is the only advantage. Seriously, I can't think of anything else that couldn't be as good or better in a good infinite scrolling implementation. Interacting with the posts in chunks arbitrarily grouped together based upon chronology is not a great way to go about it. In the era of live data, we ought to have better ways to approach and take in content.
So does that mean I'm now an infinite scrolling supporter, and a Discourse apologist, and an unrepentant fascist child-killer? Okay, yeah, I'm maybe one, one-and-a-half of those things. But I'm not yet in the tank for Discourse. The problem with shifting the paradigm, as Discourse attempts to do, is that you have to do it well. Apple succeeded with the iPhone because they managed to figure out a cleaner, simpler way to do things better. The bones of what they were trying to do had all been done before, but nobody else had managed to put them all together in a cohesive whole that worked reliably and consistently.
That's the key, then: to supplant the old methods, the new methods must feel more powerful. They have to give the user confidence that their actions will work as intended. They have to open up new avenues of function that work well enough to fade into the background. Because ultimately, the software is not the content, and it shouldn't be pulling attention away from the content.
Discourse isn't there. I admire what they're trying to do, and I am interested in seeing a successful implementation, but they don't have it yet. We can debate just how not-usable it is, and whether the gap between reality and the ideal is small enough to make the switch tenable. Personally, I'm about 55-60% in favor of the switch, while reserving the right to adjust that in a month based upon whether I see enough progress to make me comfortable that Discourse can successfully shift the paradigm.
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You do it like I just did. Read, then initiate a reply by quoting. This brings up the post editor. Keep scrolling down and reading. The editor does not inhibit reading since it is docked at the bottom of the browser. As I find other things I want to reply to, I highlight them and click quote reply as I did originally. Then I reach the end of the topic here, and I fill in my responses below each quote block.
So you're saying that I should just merge all my replies into one post? That seems a bit ... non-forumy. I like to have my posts each relate to a specific post that I'm replying to. Sometimes I'll pull in a quote from another post or two, but only if they directly relate to the post I'm writing.Did I mention that the editor saves drafts on the server automatically as you write? So I could come back to this half composed reply on a different computer a day later and finish it up and submit it. The editor will pop up if you enter the topic and have a draft reply started for that topic. Try it.
Ok, so I can make a draft, close the editor, continue reading, make another draft, and so on. Well, that would be fine, except for a couple things: Based on your described workflow, I now have to go to my profile and find my drafts to delete the ones I no longer want to reply to and finish the rest. That's a pain in the ass. And a lot of extra writing that I might not use.
Also, here's some bugs I found while writing this:
Bug: The position indicator (# of #) disappears when the editor is visible.
Scenario: Open the editor.Bug: When the editor is open, trying to select text that extends beyond the bottom of the window causes the text selection to stop selecting the forum text and start selecting the editor.
Scenario: Selecting post text with the editor open. Verified in Chrome on Windows 7.
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For completion, in another topic that I somehow missed, my solution has already been proposed.
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I like to have my posts each relate to a specific post that I'm replying to.
This.So you're saying that I should just merge all my replies into one post?
Yes, that is the Discourse paradigm. It goes against decades of practice and thought patterns, but hey, welcome to the Brave New World. You will like it.You will like it. You do like it. You do like it. You have always liked it...
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You will like it. You do like it. You do like it. You have always liked it...
Why do I feel like I'm in the Pit of Despair, about to lose 5 years of my life?
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Why do I feel like I'm in the Pit of Despair, about to lose 5 years of my life?
Don't worry. You won't die from being subjected to Discourse; you'll just be mostly dead.
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Lorne, I think you're overselling your point here. It's not about human psychology or cognition. The stuff about human vision, while true, strikes me at an attempt to rationalize a visceral reaction. Not that I don't disagree with the larger point that the progress bar isn't useful.
I concede that I have some emotions in there, but it pointing out facts and how things work isn't rationalizing. It's this conversation:
Me: This doesn't work. (What you're saying, intuitive, obvious)
Jeff/Sam: Yes it does.
Me: No, it doesn't, because of reasons.
Jeff/Sam: I refuse to accept your point or even acknowledge that there's a problem. Here's a chart with asspull numbers to back up my feels.
Me: Here's some fucking science. Here is how a human being works. Here is how technology works. Here is how they interact. This is fucking science that has been studied and proven.
Jam: {silence}Yes, I'm overselling it. Because if I can't convince Jeff to implement pagination, or Alex to jettison this product, then at the very least I might be able to inform one of the many, many developers who read this forum-- so they never again build a product with this crap. And they understand why they shouldn't even try. And give them ammo to shoot down other projects with this UI/UX before it even gets off the ground.
"But I feel phrenology is the way to go..."
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(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...
They could just replace the usernames with unique IDs before saving to the DB. Then on display, pull the latest username.
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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.
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UI cannot be reasoned about in a Kantian way.
That's not quite true. You can reason about UI in the abstract, but it really helps if you've studied both psychology and the physiology of the human visual system to at least graduate level first. It's astonishingly hard.However, one of the best guides to UI design I've come across is to make everything simple, discoverable and reversible. Slipping while trying to select some text for inclusion in a quoted reply shouldn't launch an all-out nuclear attack on Bhutan, but if the software does have such a capability, a user should be able to find out how to do it. (Type “Bhutan” into the target box, and press the Big Red Button; there's a video guide.)
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Based on your described workflow, I now have to go to my profile and find my drafts to delete the ones I no longer want to reply to and finish the rest.
Not at all. I'm of the impression that there can be at most one draft. It's the same one on every page you visit...
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not really, try drafting a reply on two topics. you get one per topic and one for create topic.
a ui to navigate drafts could be built, but I do not think we have time to get to it for v1.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
the green widget thing has text. X/Y. So I can't just glance at it. I have to LOOK at it, read the information and do math to figure out where I am. Just how far is 143/642 anyways?
No, you'd see that the green bar is about 20% of the way through the topic at 143/642, because the green bar is 20% of the length of the grey progress area.@Lorne_Kates said:
The green thing in the corner doesn't move or change
Yes, it does -- the green bar fills in as you progress through the topic. Just like a progress bar.I should just merge all my replies into one post?
No, but consider the extremes. What's better, 50 individual one-sentence replies to 50 different posts? That maximizes metadata cruft (username, dates, reply indicators etc) at the expense of content. In general, it is better to have fewer, longer, comprehensive replies. But 2 or 3 replies isn't going to kill anyone either.@Lorne_Kates said:
Me: This doesn't work. (What you're saying, intuitive, obvious)
Jeff/Sam: Yes it does.
Me: No, it doesn't, because of reasons.
Jeff/Sam: I refuse to accept your point or even acknowledge that there's a problem. Here's a chart with asspull numbers to back up my feels.
Me: Here's some fucking science. Here is how a human being works. Here is how technology works. Here is how they interact. This is fucking science that has been studied and proven.
Jam: {silence}
I don't think that is a fair or accurate characterization. This is:LK: Your iPad interface is retarded. Touch is a bad way to interact.
Jeff/Sam: We think touch interactions make sense, and represent the future of a vast swath of computing interactions. the whole device is based on touch.
LK: It's shit. Let me hook up a mouse to it, like I am used to, otherwise you are all fucking morons.
Jeff/Sam: The device is entirely designed around touch, adding mouse would be not only be counter to the philosophy and goals of the product, it'd take months if not years, and would also take the product in a direction it was never intended to go.
LK: Fuck you, fuck your families, I hope you all die of horribly disfiguring face cancer. This product is broken and should support a mouse because that is what we use, idiots. I will campaign against this "iPad" in every single post I make here for the rest of recorded time.It's really quite delightful.
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No, you'd see that the green bar is about 20% of the way through the topic at 143/642, because the green bar is 20% of the length of the grey progress area.
What green bar?
[img]/uploads/default/277/e2c0dd9646720278.png[/img]
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@ender, you're the last person I know that still uses the old girl, even I succumbed and switched to Chrome due to stuff breaking in it because, well, it's old.
And other than the high-contrast problem (not even sure if it's Opera's or Discourse's fault), it seems to be handling this thing rather well. That is actually genuinely impressive.
Filed under: [would pay for a genuinely good Opera 12 clone with updated rendering engine][1]
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This is actually a custom CSS that I use when reading, since it's easier on my eyes. I'll switch away from Opera 12 once too many sites become broken, or there's another browser that has all the features that I'm dependent on in it.
Before somebody says that it's my high-contrast CSS's fault that the green bar doesn't appear, here's how it looks in IE11 and Firefox 29:
[img]/uploads/default/278/81169887063b55cd.png[/img]
And unlike Opera, where I can turn off the high-contrast CSS, that's not possible in these two browsers - when the OS is in high contrast mode, so is the browser.And yeah, I'd pay for an updated Opera clone as well.
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I said I'd be fine with Discourse if the endless scrolling were removed and if it worked on mobile. As it turns out, neither of those were done
Er, what? I am literally posting this from a Nexus 5 mobile Android device. We added mobile support in Sept 2013.
So.. 1 outa 2 ain't bad?
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LK: Your iPad interface is retarded. Touch is a bad way to interact. Jeff/Sam: We think touch interactions make sense, and represent the future of a vast swath of computing interactions. the whole device is based on touch.LK: It's shit. Let me hook up a mouse to it, like I am used to, otherwise you are all fucking morons.Jeff/Sam: The device is entirely designed around touch, adding mouse would be not only be counter to the philosophy and goals of the product, it'd take months if not years, and would also take the product in a direction it was never intended to go.LK: Fuck you, fuck your families, I hope you all die of horribly disfiguring face cancer. This product is broken and should support a mouse because that is what we use, idiots. I will campaign against this "iPad" in every single post I make here for the rest of recorded time.
For what it's worth, I'm on Imaginary Lorne's side of this conversation.
The more I interact with touch screen devices, the more they infuriate and irritate me. I hate the lack of precision inherent in the fat-finger sensing, and I hate the fact that the thing I'm trying to select is covered up by the fat finger trying to select it, I hate having to hold my finger Just So in order for it to be sensed at all, I hate not being able to put the device at a comfortable distance from my eyes because I need to get my fingers to it, and I hate that the poverty of the hardware means that control is achieved via a bunch of completely arbitrary gestures and timings rather than anything likely to be discovered by exploration.
And I bitterly resent the fact that every fucking UX I encounter in 2014 has been compromised to one degree or another to fit in with the needs of these fucking stupid kindergarten touchscreen toys because the designers are too young and arrogant to have gone back through what's come before and work out why the mouse, rather than the light pen, became the dominant UI hardware control for the desktop.
Touch screens are not new. Cheap, ubiquitous touch screens are new. And new != better.
It's the same thing with paging vs. infinite scroll. We've got a couple of designers here with a total hard-on for their Way Better New Paradigm, and they keep adding little bits here and little bits there to try to make it work almost as well as the paging it's designed to supplant... and you know what? Perhaps it will. This is a fickle, fashion-driven industry, it's harder than it's ever been to actually make a device do anything that looks even vaguely commercial-comparable which means that the coding priesthood's influence is stronger than it's ever been, and resistance is, in fact, useless.
Share and enjoy, folks. Share and Enjoy as you journey through life with a plastic boy or girl by your side let your pal be your guide and when it breaks down or starts to annoy or grinds when it moves and gives you no joy cos it's eaten your hat or had sex with your cat bled oil on your floor or ripped off your door you get to the point you can't stand any more: bring it to us, we won't give a fig we'll tell you, 'Go stick your head in a pig'.
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I dunno, maybe I'm super old school, but the idea of billions of people with an insanely powerful, always-connected-to-the-Internet computer in their pocket is pretty exciting to me.
Computer on every deskop? Bill Gates was a piker. He failed to dream large enough.
I also like that touch (plus the generally smaller screens of mobile) forces programmers and designers to simplify rather than endlessly layering complexity on top of complexity in the traditional WIMP world..
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I also like that touch (plus the generally smaller screens of mobile) forces programmers and designers to simplify rather than endlessly layering complexity on top of complexity in the traditional WIMP world..
Was that image a common experience of users, an extreme case which hardly anyone was impacted by, or someone just making a point in a particularly noxious way? (Most users I've seen kept their web browsers pretty simple. But not their desktops…)
However, I think the thing that tends to get forgotten by many GUI designers (both old and new) is that discoverability is really important. It's the key to how users become better at using the interface; it's really a rare application that someone uses so much that they know everything about it. New users won't know it. Regular casual users won't remember it. How will either of them find the feature? (That's the problem with much of Discourse right now; it's mostly pretty good, but too many of the features are little secrets; for example, ? might be well known amongst a little cabal of users, but everyone else has no idea. How would someone find it? Similarly, the clickable magic links above the post don't say what they do ahead of time; I for one don't like clicking on something where I don't know what will happen…)
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I also like that touch (plus the generally smaller screens of mobile) forces programmers and designers to simplify
I agree simplicity is good, but it also causes them to forget that large-screen mouse-controlled environments can effortlessly present the amount of complexity you had to remove for the small device.The hyperbole image you posted doesn't work well for your argument, since you have to go out of your way to make it look like that; the environment does not automatically "fall" to such a state.
Usually, UI designers take the dumb route and somehow naturally believe that simplifying a UI means outright removing access to any sort of advanced or even intermediate feature; clearly a bad thing. Example: Windows 8 start screen (And TDWTF groans in unison oh god here we go again)
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So Discourse is tablet-centric so you can protect users from themselves, or just because you, personally, have a raging boner for touch devices?
If your goal is to make a forum software for tablets, then fine. Advertise it as such. Don't act like you've revolutionised the forum for the desktop user by making it shit and then saying "But it works fine for touch devices". I'm not using a touch device. Even when I am using a touch device I prefer pagination. Because having the page reload in the middle of me doing something and shuffling the scroll bar and shit around gets in the way of reading a shitload more than "Oh, I reached the end of the page, press next page."
Also, having a quintillion keyboard shortcuts is pretty useless when most touch devices don't show the keyboard 90% of the time.
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Also, having a quintillion keyboard shortcuts is pretty useless when most touch devices don't show the keyboard 90% of the time.
You guys with the mobile devices can get the fuck off my lawn. Or how I learned to love some of the keyboard shortcuts. Specifically, g,u.
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I dunno, maybe I'm super old school, but the idea of billions of people with an insanely powerful, always-connected-to-the-Internet computer in their pocket is pretty exciting to me.
Computer on every deskop? Bill Gates was a piker. He failed to dream large enough.
More is not better, and being online every waking minute is my idea of hell.
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for example, ? might be well known amongst a little cabal of users, but everyone else has no idea. How would someone find it? Similarly, the clickable magic links above the post don't say what they do ahead of time; I for one don't like clicking on something where I don't know what will happen…)
That just made me push-? and then I started to look for clickable stuff above this post ...
Both are no easy finds and then we are all IT minded people with a if it looks like a link I'll click it to see what it does kind of mentality but there are limits ...
However for now finding out where I was in threads seems to be working for me ...
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In the words of Mr. Horse: No sir, I don't like it.
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Not at all. I'm of the impression that there can be at most one draft. It's the same one on every page you visit...
So then we're stuck with just one reply for all the posts we wish to reply to. Screw that.
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No, but consider the extremes. What's better, 50 individual one-sentence replies to 50 different posts? That maximizes metadata cruft (username, dates, reply indicators etc) at the expense of content. In general, it is better to have fewer, longer, comprehensive replies. But 2 or 3 replies isn't going to kill anyone either.
Actually, after re-reading what you said, and looking at how you post, that's pretty much what you said. Here's a quick refresher:
You do it like I just did. Read, then initiate a reply by quoting. This brings up the post editor. Keep scrolling down and reading. The editor does not inhibit reading since it is docked at the bottom of the browser. As I find other things I want to reply to, I highlight them and click quote reply as I did originally. Then I reach the end of the topic here, and I fill in my responses below each quote block.
Based on the responses we keep getting from you, it seems like you guys are constantly worried about edge cases. When you bring up arguments like:
No, but consider the extremes.
You're arguing based on edge cases, which indicates that you are probably coding toward the edge cases. And coding toward the edge cases is probably going to make your "average users" angry.
As for this:
@Lorne_Kates said:
Me: This doesn't work. (What you're saying, intuitive, obvious)
Jeff/Sam: Yes it does.
Me: No, it doesn't, because of reasons.
Jeff/Sam: I refuse to accept your point or even acknowledge that there's a problem. Here's a chart with asspull numbers to back up my feels.
Me: Here's some fucking science. Here is how a human being works. Here is how technology works. Here is how they interact. This is fucking science that has been studied and proven.
Jam: {silence}LK: Your iPad interface is retarded. Touch is a bad way to interact.
Jeff/Sam: We think touch interactions make sense, and represent the future of a vast swath of computing interactions. the whole device is based on touch.
LK: It's shit. Let me hook up a mouse to it, like I am used to, otherwise you are all fucking morons.
Jeff/Sam: The device is entirely designed around touch, adding mouse would be not only be counter to the philosophy and goals of the product, it'd take months if not years, and would also take the product in a direction it was never intended to go.
LK: Fuck you, fuck your families, I hope you all die of horribly disfiguring face cancer. This product is broken and should support a mouse because that is what we use, idiots. I will campaign against this "iPad" in every single post I make here for the rest of recorded time.I think that the truth lies somewhere in between.
Also, your analogy doesn't work. The iPad/tablets in general were a brand new technology. Something so new that introducing a new interface method made complete sense. Users weren't going to always have access to a mouse and keyboard. Discourse is not a brand new technology. It's just a new approach to the already existing forum market. All Discourse is doing is saying "Hey, here's a totally different way of doing things. As for the "it'd take months, it not years, to implement" bit, that may have applied to tablets in the early days, but it certainly doesn't apply to Discourse. As many here have pointed out, the paging is there, it's just hidden by "fancy" javascript. There's no way that it would take months or years to add an optional paging interface to Discourse.
And I should point out that only 1 person out of 54 on Poll: Infinite Scrolling wants only paging. Most people (49/54) think that paging/infinite scrolling should be a user configurable option.
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You're arguing based on edge cases, which indicates that you are probably coding toward the edge cases. And coding toward the edge cases is probably going to make your "average users" angry.
I don't come to that conclusion. Nevertheless, you have to consider edge cases, and places like this are really going to push the boundaries. I think their mention of edge cases is more a reflection on the fact that they've been dealing with this stuff in very detailed ways for a lot longer than we've been trying to take it apart.
Because your edge case is blakeyrat's main mode of interaction, and then he goes all nucular on your ass for being a horrible person and an incompetent software developer.
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... you have to consider edge cases ...
I totally agree that coding for the edge cases is worthwhile. But only after you've at least handled for the more standard cases. Based on the arguments that @sam and @codinghorror tend to put forward, they seem concerned about two things:
- Their personal idea of the way things should be.
- Edge cases.
Their "average users" don't seem to enter much into their thoughts. And the analogy that @codinghorror put forward just seems to emphasize that.
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Their personal idea of they way things should be.
I can understand pushing back on users who want to do something that's against its creators basic reasons for creating the software. Time is limited and I'm sure they have a long list of stuff already going on (in addition to some of the quick fixes we've seen). I've had plenty of arguments with users about why what they were asking for was wrong. I can also say that sometimes I've prevailed and sometimes not.
You're also begging the question about their average users. Even about TDWTF users.
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Liked that post because it's the first time in weeks I've seen "beg the question" used in its original/"correct" style
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Because your edge case is blakeyrat's main mode of interaction, and then he goes all nucular on your ass for being a horrible person and an incompetent software developer.
But he does that for even “trivial” things like trying to make the underlying code right rather than putting all effort on the GUI. (Sometimes, you've got to put effort into the chassis even if the second note on the Dixie-playing horn is slightly flat.)
Filed under: got one of those near work; drives me crazy!
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There's no way that it would take months or years to add an optional paging interface to Discourse.
Well, Discourse is open source. Feel free to build a plugin that adds paging, if it's so easy.
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Well, Discourse is open source. Feel free to build a plugin that adds paging, if it's so easy.
Well, I know it's extremely easy to do in ASP.NET*. From what I gather, though, Discourse is Ruby on Rails, so I'm not exactly qualified to build the plug-in. However, as has been pointed out repeatedly, there is a paging interface here, it's just hidden by your "fancy", AJAXy infinite-scroll. Too bad turning off javascript to get the paginated interface turns off your ability to post.
Plus, how can you claim that it would take months or years to develop a feature that has been done over, and over, and over, on basically ever platform out there?
And, as has been mentioned before, why should we, who have our own jobs, pour our time and money into building a plug-in, when Alex may or may not use it, and future changes to Discourse may or may not break it? Let's see what kind of commitment you're asking us to make in building a plugin:
- Get access to a compatible server
- Install Discourse
- Figure out the necessary API's to hook into to create a paging interface
- Test the hell out of said paging interface
- Make sure that the paging interface is optional, don't want to piss off those who've expressed a preference for infinite scrolling
- Pass it to Alex and beg him to install it on the forums here
- Fix bugs as they are found
- Keep up on Discourse releases, and make sure Alex doesn't upgrade his install of Discourse until you've made sure that there are no breaking changes
Seems like a hell of a commitment. Especially since (as I've mentioned) we've discovered that the paging is there if you just turn off javascript. Why can't you guys just make it an option to expose the already present paging interface, instead of telling us to do it ourselves?
* As easy as, if this were an ASP.NET system, I could probably implement a paging UI, with a reasonable amount of testing, in a couple days.
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Pass it to Alex and beg him to install it on the forums here
No need, I'd just install it without testing, and blame you if it breaks. Of course if it works, I'll take the credit.
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No need, I'd just install it without testing, and blame you if it breaks. Of course if it works, I'll take the credit.
Gasp! Even more incentive! Guess I'll get right to work ... 
Note: Emoji included for those without functioning sarcasm-meters.
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Also, your analogy doesn't work. The iPad/tablets in general were a brand new technology.
Were they? I don't think so. Also, TabletPC would like a word with you.
Any resemblance to Community Server is, I'm sure, completely coincidental.
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Were they? I don't think so. Also, TabletPC would like a word with you.
Any resemblance to Community Server is, I'm sure, completely coincidental.
Ummm .. try re-reading my post again. Here's the line you appear to have trouble with, emphasis added:
The iPad/ tablets in general were a brand new technology.
And, as far as I can recall, all predecessors to the iPad had touchscreens. Sure, you had to have a stylus, but that's still a form of touchscreen technology.
Edit: Added whitespace to get emphasis in quote to work correctly.
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Tablets, as of the introduction of the iPad, were not "a brand new technology":
The previous tablet implementations had just suuuuucked. And even the first version of iPad kinda sucked, to be honest: 256mb ram? Seriously?
Any resemblance between all previous forum software sucking, is, I am sure, coincidental. I have never met a single person who was willing to tell me that they liked forums. And I have talked to a lot of people about this.
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I have never met a single person who was willing to tell me that they liked forums.
I like forums. And if we ever meet, I'll tell it to you to your face.
And I assume everyone who HAS told you they like forums, you've ignored. Or you surround yourself with a yes-man echo chamber.
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I have never met a single person who was willing to tell me that they liked forums.
I like forums.
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I like forums
Where the fuck did that come from, CodingHorror? Are you just trying to be obtuse now?
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I actually also like forums, forum software in general less so, but forums sure.
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