I'm A Grumpy Cat: An open letter to Alex
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The only other place I know of that uses infinite scrolling is Google Images.
Bing Images and Pinterest also do, but the common theme between all of those is that you start from the top and scroll down. You never start from the "middle" like Discourse does.Of course, another common theme is none of those "unload" things that have scrolled out of view, which is also where Discourse deviates.
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January, 1st 2014
Can't confuse that.Wait..... wtf.... how do I quote???
Oh there's a box?
Wait, that doesn't quote the previous quote.
WHAT THE HELL!?!??!?!?!
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You can if you live in a country where the thought process was: Hey, you know those international month names? Yeah, fuck that, let's invent our own!
Due to human freaking memory, I have to first remap the English month name to local month name, then local month name to a number, 'cause fuck names, I don't remember which month names are in summer, I remember it's months 6, 7 and 8 (adjust for inflation).
I'm probably an edge case, but hey, I still hate it.
For quoting: little speech bubble in the editor toolbar to quote the post you're replying to. Select text and wait for the quote floating control thiggy to appear for quoting in general.
Nested quotes are apparently a Bad Thing™ and don't work. You can emulate them like so:>Quote level 1 >>Quote level 2
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This post is deleted!
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My thoughts are that virtually all modern data solutions support pagination, not infinite scrolling.
Infinite scrolling is therefore either inefficient (pulling one data item at a time), or navigation unstable (pulling several records at a time)Editors support infinite scrolling. You add lines, scrollbar adjusts to new height. However, they also support page up and down.
Page up and down in a browser navigates by browser page height.
Whereas page up and down in editors navigate by pages (if they support the concept). Page up in Word, and you navigate to the previous printable page.Ctrl + Up/Down navigate between paragraphs.
I think if the website could mark pages for page up and down navigation as well as Ctrl Up/Down, we might have better infinite scrolling.
What I'm thinking is that results are retrieved by page, and page up/down support navigating between pages, and Ctrl Up/Down navigate between posts. Then you have back links to quotes. The scrollbar gives you the ability to jump to the top/bottom.
What I'm saying is that if you have infinite scrolling, you need to support keystrokes for post to post navigation.
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you need to support keystrokes for post to post navigation.
They do. K/J move to previous and next, respectively. Those are hidden under the "keyboard shortcuts" window, found by typing ? when not in an editor.
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Ah.
I'd like an up/down X posts as well though.
It's a little buggy for me. It doesn't jump to the top of the post, but halfway down the previous post.
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I'd try to find the quote from Atwood regarding it (paraphrasing, "our focus would be on the center, not the top or bottom", which is why the "focused" post is centered), but fuck the search is mostly useless.
[Edit] Found it:
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/frist-and-welcome/238/360
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I may sound like a prick to you with the whole scrollbar thing, but I am honestly trying to figure out what particular use cases we are missing out on and improve on them. Chucking all the topics in pure html form in the stream is impractical, traditional paging is a problem we set out to solve with the product.
The thing is, traditional paging isn't a problem. It's not broken. There may be quirks, but it's nowhere near as bad as infinite scrolling. You're trying to create a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and the "solution" is worse than the problem.
TDTWF is now powered by the corpse of Steve Krug spinning in his grave since terminated his process after seeing Discourse. Everything in "Don't Make Me Think" seems to be violated in Discourse. With StackExchange and Discourse, I've noticed that every single minor task makes you think, it's not done in a predictable manner, and it slows you down.
Which highlights why Discourse isn't for us. Right now, we're in Jeff's chemistry lab. He's trying new things, reinventing processes that have solutions that are time-tested and nearly perfect, but not quite there. Building everything from the ground up. We are the guinea pigs in his experiments, and this one (scrolling) has blown up in our faces.
There will most likely be a lot of features from Discourse that you'll see implemented in systems like CS and phpBB in the future, but right now, we're dealing with a lot of cotton filament bulb attempts, and they just don't work. There are also minor issues (the Save button on my profile wasn't enabled after typing in my city), but those are known bugs, so it's not a conceptual mistake like the scrolling issue.
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That neatly sums up all of last week's complaints - well said.
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I don't go on the forum much, I usually just read/comment on the articles. According to my profile on the old forum, I only had 4 posts.
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That neatly sums up all of last week's complaints - well said.
What does? I tried clicking the link that would take me to the post you're replying to, but the page just blinks, and nothing else happens.
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My comment directly above his.
-replying to comment 163 out of 162
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According to my profile on the old forum, I only had 4 posts.
Fascinating that despite the shithouse Krug, Nielsen and Tufte Gang Rape interface here you are able to both read and reason about long ass topics and create more than 4 posts.
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Fascinating that despite the shithouse Krug, Nielsen and Tufte Gang Rape interface here you are able to both read and reason about long ass topics and create more than 4 posts.
I could do it on a stock yabbse install, doesn't mean much.
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Editors support infinite scrolling.
Open-world games also do infinite scrolling.
Texture and object popping are still problems.
Maybe we could program a horse or a fast car you could get on & in to navigate the forums.
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Ok, so page links are tiny.
Make them bigger. Like, really really big. I should also go to bed, but I want to see what crazy shit I can come up with while partially asleep.
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Like maybe:
| 
| 
where the
icon is a drop down just like the avatar one.
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Fascinating that despite the shithouse Krug, Nielsen and Tufte Gang Rape interface here you are able to both read and reason about long ass topics and create more than 4 posts.
I may get censored for this, but here goes anyway.
Fuck off, Sam. Were you active on TDWTF? You haven't earned the right to piss on TDWTF posters.
Go have a look at the feedback, and figure out where TRWTF is,
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Fuck off, Sam. Were you active on TDWTF?
I forgot, over here I am just entitled to sit quietly in the corner with my ass cheeks open, while people apply giant dildos up my ass.
Thanks for reminding me.
....
Back on topic, I just made this commit:
FEATURE: posts per page is configurable, so should be desktop slack · discourse/discourse@7861cab
A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple. - FEATURE: posts per page is configurable, so should be desktop slack · discourse/discourse@7861cab
It just has effect on desktop (not mobile or touch), what it means is that as a Discourse admin you can set how much stuff we "unpeel" from the DOM.
As people here are VERY used to the traditional way things go, I made 2 changes.
- Posts per batch is up to 50, more inline with previous forum.
- Set desktop slack to 999, meaning the unloading behavior is pretty much stripped. This means scrubbing should work as expected and find in page is better albeit not perfect.
If you really want to you can even load the whole topic now and scrub as much as you want.
While scrubbing, fps meter is really low, so rendering is not a bottleneck
Regarding history loitering.
Personally I see the appeal of doing history in a different way. replaceState is very limited, it does not allow you to "hint" the browser not to add history checkpoints. I would prefer if we simple checkpointed every "page" and used "#" bookmarks per post. It would also make the URLs in the top bar consistent with the canonicals.
However @codinghorror and Robin the other 2 founders are not that keen on this change.
That said, I agree with @codinghorror that browser history is really a function that only few power users use. Ever since we started Discourse the complaint about history only popped up twice, once on the Ember.js forum and another time here.
I think its a problem, but its not something I think is critical to fix.
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Perhaps if you don't want to be butt hurt about people calling your projects shitty you should make better stuff.
Bug: you can't see what you're typing in android + chrome landscape mode.
I see this:
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Bug: you can't see what you're typing in android + chrome landscape mode.
Position fixed is hell on mobiles, we do want to get that fixed.
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Perhaps if you don't want to be butt hurt about people calling your projects shitty you should make better stuff.
Cause OBVIOUSLY, I am totally ignoring all the feedback here, and just doing whatever I can to maximise the amount I can piss everyone off here.
Thanks for reminding me.
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I just noticed that replaceState, in the browser's infinite wisdom, clears search results, another reason we should be more frugal with it.
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I forgot, over here I am just entitled to sit quietly in the corner with my ass cheeks open, while people apply giant dildos up my ass.
Thanks for reminding me.
Meah. I don't think you can get a rise out of me one way or the other. I have thicker skin than you can imagine. I like a lot of what I see with this software. It's just that the infinite scrolling mistake sticks out so much.
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@Onyx said:
@Onyx said:
@Onyx said:
Nested quotes are apparently a Bad Thing™ and don't work.
Actually, I fixed that.
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You did, and I don't object provided they are manually entered.
Pretty hellish, UI wise. (And expansion doesn't work at all with it.)
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Editors support infinite scrolling.
And if they also support word-wrapping of paragraphs — or anything that makes the logical lines variable height, such as included pictures or a font that can be changed — then that calculation of the height is really complicated and expensive. Even if we consider a piece of professional software like Microsoft Word, we see that on loading a longer document it takes a while for the scrollbar to become correct. (For some reason they don't appear to save a cache of the computed line heights. No idea why.)
Doing it in Javascript in a mix between a server and collection of clients isn't going to make it easier.
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This stops us from killing your browser when you are browsing a 10,000 post topic (or 100 post topic with tons of images)
If only there was some way to present a subset of posts at a time, without having to dynamically load and unload them. I guess we can only dream about such a miraculous, never-before-seen feature.
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Nested quotes in discussions are soooo ugly from a UI perspective. From a reader perspective, they make it harder to follow conversations, since we can usually recall the context from the small quote.
But I have to say, they're a good kind of bad. Like leopard skin. Everyone knows its ugly, except maybe one person who actually thinks it's cool, and that's what makes it fun. When/if it gets out of hand, mods can just edit it down.
So thank you @ben_lubar for making it possible, and thank you @codinghorror for not making it the default.
FWIW I also put the rediculous selection of emotiwhatevers in this category. Tacky fun.
Wait, seriously, wind chime??
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I think I've said it before, but I have blockquote-in-blockquote set to 80% fontsize so that:
- it's visually distinct from the level-zero text
- older text sort of recedes into the background, so again it doesn't distract from reading the pertinent stuff
- by the power of limits, the total quote-pyramid will not ever reach crazy sizes in practical situations.
I cannot emphasize enough how well it works.
It works really well.
Guys.
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I need to find a spot where someone has validly made a small quote pyramid, so I can screenshot it and show that it works really well, but I can't be arsed to travel the breadth of the forums.
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What about those topics where people quote pyramid the entire page's source code?
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Those people are assholes and we shall not cater to them.
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blockquote-in-blockquote set to 80% fontsize so that
sounds like a good idea, should we try that?
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You haven't earned the right to piss on TDWTF posters.
This right has traditionally been earned by creating an account. It seems to me that @sam has done that.
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Actually, I fixed that.
Err...so what do you do to get that to work? I didn't see anything obvious in the FAQ, and I haven't noticed that you've explained what you did.
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FWIW I also put the rediculous selection of emotiwhatevers in this category. Tacky fun.
Is there a list of all of them somewhere? Let's marvel in the tacky fun available to us (and as long as they're not animated, they're not that bad; unlike the stupid restricted set in Skype…)Filed under: WTF is “(emo)” in there for?? Seriously…
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Probably, but I found them by typing : then a letter.
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So...like I said, what do I do to get nested quotes?
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So...like I said, what do I do to get nested quotes?
Gotta kill a few people. Then you got to get sent to a slam, where they tell you you'll never see daylight again. You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs.
Filed under: Fucking hell why doesn't it insert the quote where my text insertion cursor is?
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Pretty hellish, UI wise
@apapadimoulis said:Nested quotes in discussions are soooo ugly from a UI perspective.
Because what we see before us is a work of pure UI genius.
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@boomzilla said:
So...like I said, what do I do to get nested quotes?
Gotta kill a few people. Then you got to get sent to a slam, where they
tell you you'll never see daylight again. You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs.Manual coding gets me this lovely thing ^
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And here is how that looks for me:
(Yes, I have brute-forced Stylish to make everything my favourite font; still have to fix it for the icons -- even though I tried no Stylish once and the icons were really in-your-face, so maybe not.)
Interesting: even though I replied to and fullquoted @error, there is not quote popup at the top of my post.
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It's 5AM on a Sunday, so please forgive the incomplete analysis; here are my notes so far (not repeating above observations to avoid being redundant)...
Positive point:
- Unlike the CS system, which has locked me out for years, and will not allow me to register a new account (validation emails never arrive at any of my registered emails), I can actually register and post here! So I'm back after a six year hiatus of forced silent lurking. HELLO WORLD! (Again.) (Yes, I could have written a letter to Alex - just too lazy I guess.)
Negative point:
- On long articles like this, the infinite scrolling makes it tedious to get near the middle of an article. Frequent hesitation in browser response, and just waiting...which leads to my:
Suggestion:
- The green bar - could we possibly add a middle button where we can enter the comment number we want to jump to? Let's say I newly registered an account and came back to the article here, or my browser settings were cleaned out, or I've just decided to go there randomly, etc. - click the middle for a text box, I enter '48' and jump to comment 48 of 185. Admittedly a nice to have, but I thought I'd ask.
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could we possibly add a middle button where we can enter the comment number we want to jump to
Yes, something like this is planned, just need to get the UI right.
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Just noticed the grey "why does the URL change" note. By changing the /199 to /48 at the end of the URL in the address bar, I jump to comment #48. At least it's a workaround.
