I'm A Grumpy Cat: An open letter to Alex
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I'm more-or-less used to the UI now. My biggest complaint at this point is performance. A website should not be so slow on a 4.5 GHz quad-core i5 with 16 GB RAM and a Radeon R9 280X. My PC literally performs better at Crysis than Discourse.
Filed under: New hardware meme: But can it play Discourse?
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We didn't even have a mobile design for ~10 months after launch. At all. And mobile is kind of important, wouldn't you say, to the future of all computing? Maybe just a little? A tiny bit?
We made that choice because the devices with real keyboards attached tend to be the place where most of the content (read: typing) is generated. So it's our primary audience, but the secondary (mobile/tablet) is equally important, and arguably more important over the 10 year timeline of the project we're working from.
That still doesn't answer my critique of giving to power users only, and then deciding whether to give it to general users later based on actual usage. Let's try this scenario:
Joe becomes a member of a Discourse forum. By some fluke, he hits ? and gets the hidden context menu. He starts learning the keyboard shortcuts. After a month, Joe has learned the shortcuts by heart, and become a Power User.
A month later, you add a new feature, accessible only via keyboard shortcut. Joe never learns of this feature, because he never read the thread with the post about it, and he never looks at the help menu anymore, since he believes that he knows all the shortcuts already. Joe might like to use the new feature, but he won't, because he is unaware of it.
After some indeterminate amount of time, you review the usage of this new feature, only to discover that usage is low. As a result, it never gets revealed to the general users. Little do you realize, existing Power Users like Joe never used the feature, because they didn't know it existed. Only developing Power Users used it, because they still needed to consult the help menu on a regular to semi-regular basis.
In short, making a new feature available only to Power Users, and then determining whether to make it available to general users based on usage is an ass-backwards way to go.
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The scrollbar is massively suppressed in OS X and iOS already. It's not even visible most of the time. So to argue that the scrollbar, in a world of infinite content (can you get to the end of the Internet?) is this hugely massively important bit of UI, just doesn't make sense to me. If it's so important, why would Apple go so far to suppress it?
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You know what else breaks the browser's history? Gmail. Good thing nobody uses that piece of crap, right?
Just because some big company does something stupid doesn't mean that it isn't stupid. It just means they've done enough right that people are willing to overlook their stupid.
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@codinghorror said:
You know what else breaks the browser's history? Gmail. Good thing nobody uses that piece of crap, right?
You know, the expected behavior for Gmail would be:- View a page of the inbox or a folder or a label, get a history item
- View an email thread, get a history item
- Scroll through an email thread, don't get any history items
Which is how it works. That's not broken, that's how the history works on generally any site, by design. When a page "loads", you get a new history item. Gmail is no different.
How Discourse works is different. While not broken per se, it is very, very spammy. The point that Gmail doesn't put in history items (reading through an email thread), Discourse does, so if I, in one go, read a 300 post <s>thread</s>topic, I now have 300 history items thrown in my browser history instead of just 1.
That is effectively where I believe @tufty is saying you're breaking the browser history. Only the initial view into a topic should put in a history item, not every post I look at.
There are two possibilities:
- You haven't actually tried looking at your history and you're lying through your teeth.
- Your browser is broken and it's something Discourse needs to work around.
Just because the address bar changes doesn't mean your back button changes. Correlation does not imply causation.
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There are two possibilities:
- You haven't actually tried looking at your history and you're lying through your teeth.
- Your browser is broken and it's something Discourse needs to work around.
Just because the address bar changes doesn't mean your back button changes. Correlation does not imply causation.
Are you saying that he's lying about Gmail's behavior or Discourse's? Because I've seen exactly what he's talking about in my browser history (Chrome 35). It's done in a way that doesn't affect the back button, but he is right. Gmail doesn't shit all over my history like Discourse does. And apparently @codinghorror is aware of Discourse's behavior, because he's trying to excuse it.
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@ben_lubar said:
@ChaosTheEternal said:
@codinghorror said:
You know what else breaks the browser's history? Gmail. Good thing nobody uses that piece of crap, right?
You know, the expected behavior for Gmail would be:- View a page of the inbox or a folder or a label, get a history item
- View an email thread, get a history item
- Scroll through an email thread, don't get any history items
Which is how it works. That's not broken, that's how the history works on generally any site, by design. When a page "loads", you get a new history item. Gmail is no different.
How Discourse works is different. While not broken per se, it is very, very spammy. The point that Gmail doesn't put in history items (reading through an email thread), Discourse does, so if I, in one go, read a 300 post <s>thread</s>topic, I now have 300 history items thrown in my browser history instead of just 1.
That is effectively where I believe @tufty is saying you're breaking the browser history. Only the initial view into a topic should put in a history item, not every post I look at.
There are two possibilities:
- You haven't actually tried looking at your history and you're lying through your teeth.
- Your browser is broken and it's something Discourse needs to work around.
Just because the address bar changes doesn't mean your back button changes. Correlation does not imply causation.
Are you saying that he's lying about Gmail's behavior or Discourse's? Because I've seen exactly what he's talking about in my browser history (Chrome 35). It's done in a way that doesn't affect the back button, but he is right. Gmail doesn't shit all over my history like Discourse does. And apparently @codinghorror is aware of Discourse's behavior, because he's trying to excuse it.I opened a new tab, typed
what.thedailywtf.comand pushed enter. Then I clicked to go to the first post of this topic and scrolled down to the bottom using the down arrow key. This is what I have for my back button:
Is your experience different?
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The scrollbar is massively suppressed in OS X and iOS already. It's not even visible most of the time. So to argue that the scrollbar, in a world of infinite content (can you get to the end of the Internet?) is this hugely massively important bit of UI, just doesn't make sense to me. If it's so important, why would Apple go so far to suppress it?
The scrollbar is most certainly /not/ massively suppressed under OSX (at least not on my install), except in the case where showing it would be pointless. It's mostly suppressed under iOS, but that's because the navigation conventions are different under iOS. Now, these are OS-wide conventions, and Apple can get away with what they are doing because they control the OS. Remember, what you're talking about there is "baked into the OS" behaviour, not app-specific behaviour. The sort of behaviour that all applications are expected to implement.Now, you haven't somehow magically changed the desktop navigation conventions across my desktop OS, all you're done is fuck up the navigation conventions for one "just another fucking website"[1], making it clash horribly with the rest of the OS. Well done you.
But, you say,
@codinghorror said:The actual behavior of the scrollbar is about the same as it is on paginated interfaces. You reach the bottom and you have to do something to load more content.
Except that's wrong. On a normal paginated website, I know that the scrollbar (and keyboard-activated search[2]) only operate on what's loaded on that page. With your retard-a-thon, I have no idea what I'm working on, because I haven't got the faintest clue where the "page" bounds are. So you've managed to break 2 major OS-provided UI elements.How you spam the history has already been pointed out elsewhere. Just stop it, already. ISTR @sam mentioning that it was a bug he wanted to see fixed before v1.0, so you might want to stop pulling half-thought-through bullshit out of your ass to try and make the bugs in your software sound like intended behaviour, too. You'll always get caught, so just man up.
As for the tablet thing, I tried plugging in a mouse. That kinda almost works, but it's still broken.
Oh, and your footnote implementation is fucked. One footnote works, more than one and the footnotes lose their first word and their number.
Simon
[1] © 2014, @sam
[2] by default Command-F on a Mac and Ctrl-F on Windows, but don't go getting clever and trying to rebind the OS-specific keys, because I have it bound to Ctrl-S at an OS level - yeah, I'm an emacs user - and, as far as I'm aware, you have no way of knowing that.
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@abarker said:
@ben_lubar said:
@ChaosTheEternal said:
That is effectively where I believe @tufty is saying you're breaking the browser history. Only the initial view into a topic should put in a history item, not every post I look at.
There are two possibilities:- You haven't actually tried looking at your history and you're lying through your teeth.
- Your browser is broken and it's something Discourse needs to work around.
Just because the address bar changes doesn't mean your back button changes. Correlation does not imply causation.
Are you saying that he's lying about Gmail's behavior or Discourse's? Because I've seen exactly what he's talking about in my browser history (Chrome 35). It's done in a way that doesn't affect the back button, but he is right. Gmail doesn't shit all over my history like Discourse does. And apparently @codinghorror is aware of Discourse's behavior, because he's trying to excuse it.
I opened a new tab, typedwhat.thedailywtf.comand pushed enter. Then I clicked to go to the first post of this topic and scrolled down to the bottom using the down arrow key. This is what I have for my back button:
Is your experience different?
No, my experience isn't different. But then, the back button doesn't always reflect the complete history. There are ways of updating the browser's URL which alter the history, but don't affect the back button. Apparently, that is what Discourse is doing. Here's what my history shows after doing exactly what you described:
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That's not what we're talking about. This is what we're talking about:
Dammit - beaten to the post.
Simon
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There are two possibilities:
How about possibility #3, that when I said History, I meant Browser History, same as what @abarker (and @tufty) posted:
@abarker said:
That is what is broken. If I was going to talk about the back/forward history from the back/forward buttons, I would've mentioned those buttons somewhere in my post. Also, look at the context of my quote (you know, the feature @codinghorror harps on, which I will give credit for, it is nice, besides when it flat out breaks), the screenshot right after my quoted text is of Chrome's History page, not of the back/forward history.
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I just noticed something. @sam, @codinghorror: just curious, but is there a reason that your URL scheme includes both the topic title and id? It just seems a little redundant. Not that I'm asking you to change it, I'm just curious. I'm guessing that it has something to do with combining human and machine readability.
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s there a reason that your URL scheme includes both the topic title and id? It just seems a little redundant
I imagine that topic titles in urls aren't guaranteed unique, but are really nice to have.
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I imagine that topic titles in urls aren't guaranteed unique, but are really nice to have.
While not exactly like what I said, I mentioned that in my post. Oh, here it is:
I'm guessing that it has something to do with combining human and machine readability.
You have a terrible habit of reading only part of my posts before replying. That habit could lead to you misunderstanding what was said, or repeating what the original post said. You should look into that.
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I just noticed something. @sam, @codinghorror: just curious, but is there a reason that your URL scheme includes both the topic title and id? It just seems a little redundant.
It's typically an SEO thing.
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It allows the title of the topic to be changed without breaking links to it, and it makes links give more context than just "the 115th post on the 407th topic."
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It allows the title of the topic to be changed without breaking links to it, and it makes links give more context than just "the 115th post on the 407th topic."
Actually, I think that would break links. Changing the title of the topic would change the URL, so old links would no longer be valid as they would still contain the old title.
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Changing the title of the topic would change the URL, so old links would no longer be valid as they would still contain the old title.
You're assuming the back end is paying any attention to that part of the URI. Since there is sufficient context elsewhere in the URI to get to the post, it can be ignored when serving the page.
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http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/potato-pancakes-are-called-latkes/407/116
I stand corrected. As you can probably tell, I've never worked on a system that serves up dynamic content.
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You have a terrible habit of reading only part of my posts before replying. That habit could lead to you misunderstanding what was said, or repeating what the original post said. You should look into that.
Eh...I think @ben_lubar is closer to accurate about things being changed. It could easily be done if you're doing some sort of REST thing. Which it appears is accurate. Replace the topic name with anything. It's redirected. So yes, you're right that it's about human readability, which wasn't really my point. I was just thinking they didn't want to go to the effort of worrying about uniqueness.
EDIT: which I now see that he's pointed out
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General very loosely aimed question: what environment are people that complain about performance in?
Chrome 35 on Linux, dual-core i5 @ 1.7GHz (clocked at @ 782MHz as I'm writing this, which I'm gonna guess is minimal clock speed), 6GB RAM, I saw no performance degradation I could link directly to Discourse at any point.
I had some slowdown once while browsing Discourse, but I also had a VM, NoMachine and hell knows how many other applications open at the time as well (and Chrome was certainly not the most CPU and/or RAM hogging process at that time).
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Chrome 35 on Windows 7 x64, Intel Core 2 Quad @2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, 3 screen display (it's on one of the two DVI displays), it's a bit jittery. Not as bad in IE10, but still noticable, and Firefox gets jumpy when scrolling, but that may very well be Firefox itself.
Chrome for iPad, iPad 2. The site very often just stops working, and when it does work (or when using it in Safari), it drains the battery as fast as watching YouTube videos does.
Chrome on Android 4.4, Motorola Droid Maxx. It's really slow on every load, whether on 4G or WiFi, can't tell if clicks are working (due to the "no loading" feature), and slowness on AJAX loading is more noticable, especially since it seems to "unload" posts almost as soon as they're off the screen (literally, I can go to the very bottom of suggested topics, scroll back up, and it has to reload the last post in the topic).
Filed under: [There seems to be a theme with the browsers I use](#tag)
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Is your experience different?
You're confusing history ad back button. Apparently they're different things.
Try looking at your actual history.
(unless Chrome does that differently from Firefox?)
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(unless Chrome does that differently from Firefox?)
Nope, the screen shot I gave him was of history in Chrome.
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Nope, the screen shot I gave him was of history in Chrome.
Well duh, obviously I didn't read that before I replied.
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For all the complaints I have about Discourse, I can't say I've experienced any CPU-based slowdowns. Then again, maybe I'm just used to every website running like shit and don't notice it. Or it's running fine. One of those two. For what it's worth, I have been keeping an eye on Task Manager specifically because of this. Haven't seen any huge CPU or memory spikes. If it is slowing down, you are on a computer. It has ways of measuring these things. Do that.
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I admit at first I didn't think the History spamming mattered. Then I tried to come back to this thread via the browser's URL. I would expect typing a keyword, like "Grumpy", to bring up one hit per page-- so maybe a 3 pages if this was CS (current post count is 124). Nope. Not at all! Instead, 124 entries. So yup, another browser-breaking behavior from Discourse.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Infinite scrolling and scroll bars cannot work. Will not work. Anyone who wants infinite scrolling does not want a scroll bar. Anyone who wants a scroll bar does not want infinite scrolling.
They can if you keep the previous content loaded, like happens in other sites that have implemented it.
Scroll to the bottom, more content loads, and the scroll bar adjusts to the new size of the full body and then behaves predictably and doesn't do strange things when you try and scroll back up to a specific part.
They cannnot, however, work with this implementation of it.
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My biggest complaint at this point is performance. A website should not be so slow on a 4.5 GHz quad-core i5 with 16 GB RAM and a Radeon R9 280X. My PC literally performs better at Crysis than Discourse.
If you're using Firefox, note that FF in my experience performs noticeably worse than Chrome. At least with Discourse. I long ago switched away from Firefox, the performance just isn't there (not to mention no process isolation).I haven't got the faintest clue where the "page" bounds are
Sure you do. Look at the scrollbar. When it reaches the bottom, more will load. (Versus having to find the tiny "load next page" button, move your mouse or finger to it, and click it.)your footnote implementation is fucked
There is no footnote implementation. Are you somehow fighting with the way Markdown handles URLs?
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(Versus having to find the tiny "load next page" button, move your mouse or finger to it, and click it.)
We get it, you hate pagination. You think it should be eradicated. Good for you.
But as of right now, only 4 people on Poll: Infinite Scrolling absolutely, 100%, agree with you. So stop trying to tell those of us that like paging that we're wrong.
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The issue is that when you see two posts marked "@ 22:42", refering to your 22:42, it tells you absolutely nothing about what was poster's time.
And virtually nobody gives a shit about whether you're posting in your lunch break or in the dead of night due to insomnia. If you really want to give that sort of info away, edit your preferences to say what your location is; it'll be way more informative to most people than putting a guess at the timezone in. We don't need to make everyone have to struggle to figure out some random other timezone — there are some bizarre ones out there — and the only one they should really care about is their current one. (Servers would have to care, except they can avoid the whole morass by just using Unix seconds-from-epoch.)
Timezones are waaaay fucked up. Anyone thinking otherwise doesn't know the truth of it.
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You know what else breaks the browser's history? Gmail. Good thing nobody uses that piece of crap, right?
How is that breaking your history?
I take it back, google doesn't do anything to my browser history, so I don't even know what's wrong.
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By the way, submitting the edit to my last post just closed the tab I had open. No warning, nothing. Not even sure how that's possible? I assume it just crashed the tab, although that usually results in a sadface crashy tab image.
Even more surprising, the edit actually submitted and posted fine.
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But as of right now, only 4 people on Poll: Infinite Scrolling absolutely, 100%, agree with you. So stop trying to tell those of us that like paging that we're wrong.
Clearly you're wrong. He shares Steve Jobs' self-opinion that he knows better than you what you want. That's one of his blog posts even (didn't he link it in this very thread?). He even talks up Apple UI choices on the scrollbar, probably a Jobs choice.
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There are a lot of people that want to hook up a mouse to an iPad.
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There are a lot of people that want to hook up a mouse to an iPad.
Unclear how this relates to scrollbars.
The mouse on the iPad might fix the currently unusable-on-mobile discourse features that are hover-only though, so maybe it's a good idea!
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There are a lot of people that want to hook up a mouse to an iPad.
What the hell does that have to do with paging? Oh right, you think that paging is dumb, so you lump those of us who like paging with those who try to use a mouse with an iPad. Guess what? It's not the same thing! Several of us have explained why paging in a forum generally makes sense for us. You'll never change our minds, so stop being an insulting asshole.
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Unclear how this relates to scrollbars.
The mouse on the iPad might fix the currently unusable-on-mobile discourse features that are hover-only though, so maybe it's a good idea!
He previously compared people who want paging in Discourse to early adopters of the iPad who complained that it didn't have a keyboard and mouse. Tie-in completed.
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Ah, of course.
Can we all agree start this argument up again on a new topic? Thanks to this 136 post long thread, and the pure genius of infinite-scroll requiring me to load the entire topic any time I scroll up to find something someone else said earlier, my PC is crying.
Hell I get the "...Loading" popup now every time I scroll up and down a page that was supposedly already completely loaded once. Or so I thought.
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Hell I get the "...Loading" popup now every time I scroll up and down a page that was supposedly already completely loaded once. Or so I thought.
We peel items off the DOM as they move off screen (with a certain slack ratio) they are still stored in memory. This stops us from killing your browser when you are browsing a 10,000 post topic (or 100 post topic with tons of images)
This slack algorithm can possibly be improved and made more sophisticated.
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any time I scroll up to find something someone else said earlier, my PC is crying.
Try clicking the user and filtering to just posts by that user (if one of their posts is visible). Or search..
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Try clicking the user and filtering to just posts by that user (if one of their posts is visible). Or search..
Now, I know this may come as a shock, but not everyone uses forums the same way you do!
And I think we've already proved that this forum, for the most part, does not conform to your view of the way forums are.
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Try clicking the user and filtering to just posts by that user (if one of their posts is visible). Or search..
Excuse me, but... NO!
I've been neutral in this whole thing up until now. There are some things I like about Discourse, There are some I don't. There are bugs, which I can live with and dutifully report when I stumble onto something nobody else did yet.
And I understand you. You're trying to push the envelope here, trying to build something that's a pain in the ass to do because the fucking browser won't let you. So you create stupid hacks like pushing shit into history to make it do what you want. I get that. I'm in the same boat as you, kicking and screaming at incompetent browsers, bad specs and general disorder that is the web. And you had shit flung at you here. And I was, myself, under impression that most people are overreacting / pushing it too far for comedic effect. But this is TDWTF, I just sat back and had fun.
But seriously, this response? Yes, you're right, you can do that. It's a feature. Which DOES NOTHING TO ADDRESS POOR PERFORMANCE ISSUE. No, I can't repro either. But apparently many people can. Telling people to filter out posts because Discourse can't fucking render them without slaughtering the browser is not a fucking solution!
I've seen pages where the fucking scrollbar is so tiny I had to bust out the magnifying glass. On a computer with half the specs this one has. And it didn't kill my browser.
I'm not saying it's something you can fix easily. Or now. But fucking hell, if it's broken, it's broken. You can't just stick fingers in your ears and yell "LA LA LA LA NO REPRO, FILTER POSTS BECAUSE WE CAN ONLY RENDER 2 POSTS WITHOUT LAG LA LA LA". Your shit is broken. Admit to it, test it, fix it if you can or go back to drawing board if you can't. Unless it's freaking Doom 3 rendered through WebGL there's no fucking excuse for having a site that lags out machines in two-thousand-fucking-fourteen!
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Excuse me, but... NO!
I am EAGERLY waiting for HTMLBars it is queued to be released in the next couple of months, in early benchmarks it gives us a 3x speed boost.
We have spent tons of time improving client side perf, we are in no way done.
Performance is a feature, its a mantra I live by, and client performance is feature.
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It's not obvious, I guess, but you have a Bookmarks entry in the menu on the left side of the page when you go to your profile.
@Bulb said:That makes it useful for returning where I was yesterday, but not where I was 5 seconds ago. Fine.
I'm going to agree with Bulb, here… Having a menu option up by the
or 
which opens a list of your bookmarks would be nice.
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What, like a 'bookmarks' link in here?
That has been requested before, and is easy to do.
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More like a bookmarks icon next to the notifications and search icons, I think.
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Performance is a feature, its a mantra I live by, and client performance is feature.
Isn't it ironic that you created something with low performance?
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Nothing like some vintage Alanis irony to spice up my Friday night. :markov:
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I've been neutral in this whole thing up until now. There are some things I like about Discourse, There are some I don't. There are bugs, which I can live with and dutifully report when I stumble onto something nobody else did yet.
And I understand you. You're trying to push the envelope here, trying to build something that's a pain in the ass to do because the fucking browser won't let you. So you create stupid hacks like pushing shit into history to make it do what you want. I get that. I'm in the same boat as you, kicking and screaming at incompetent browsers, bad specs and general disorder that is the web. And you had shit flung at you here. And I was, myself, under impression that most people are overreacting / pushing it too far for comedic effect. But this is TDWTF, I just sat back and had fun.
Exactly. I don't dislike Discourse in general. There are some pretty nifty features and ideas in the software. But there are some pretty bizarrely bad features too. I am pushing a bit far for "teh lulz" on some things, but there are some genuinely annoying bugs that I'm reporting as well.
The only other place I know of that uses infinite scrolling is Google Images. And it's okay there, but ONLY in the situation that I don't ever want to go back up and look at an image I already scrolled past. Which is something people do a lot in a forum, where you might need to go back to re-read something. Note that Google didn't do infinite scrolling on their main search results. Probably a reason there.
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There are a lot of people that want to hook up a mouse to an iPad.
I was asked by a customer if we could retrieve something from an iPhone with a cracked digitizer... Guess what would have been a bloody fucking brilliant method of controlling the stupid thing!
And hey - all those iPhone 4 users trying to use their iPhone as a phone... What a bunch of morons.The only other place I know of that uses infinite scrolling is Google Images. And it's okay there, but ONLY in the situation that I don't ever want to go back up and look at an image I already scrolled past.
I feel pretty much the same about Google Images. It's the only place I've felt instantly able to work the infiniscroll (I've seen it one a few other things, and tended to get annoyed by it).
