💣 Discourse 1.2 incoming! 軣



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Gates' gamble (with both Windows 95 and MS Office) was that hardware improvements would outpace Microsoft's ability to optimize their product, therefore he focused on adding more and more features rather than optimizing for performance. And it was a good strategy, then.

    Point to you here.

    Win95 would take 5 minutes to load on my Pentium 60. A year later we had Pentium 200's and it would load in 30 seconds, which doesn't make much sense except other bottlenecks (e.g. hard drive access and throughput times) got better faster than the processor. So yes, he won that gamble.

    And that is correctly called a gamble, because at that time we didn't know what the production limits were in terms of speed of CPUs, etc. Fortunately for Gates, it was almost 100x more than the Pentium 60s that were top of the line Intel processors around the time 95 was released.

    Despite what you and @Lorne_Kates point out rightly as a product that should be a WTF talked about and laughed about in this forum, the fact is it still exists. For how long - who's to say? Personally, I would not invest long term in Discourse. Perhaps Jeff is looking to sell before the rest of the market catches on?

    As for the intentional bugs, infiniscroll (as one example) isn't limited to this forum. Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook who have millions of subscribers use this "feature" too, so I don't see us realistically convincing Jeff to stop using it - especially if his target customer audience are PHBs who want the look and feel of a Facebook or LinkedIn, not "old 90's paging style" (even though it [EDIT]: paging works better). They vote with their wallet, which is all that's important to a business owner. IT-savvy business owners like @Polygeekery and @FrostCat are unfortunately in the minority.



  • @redwizard said:

    infiniscroll (as one example) isn't limited to this forum [...] not "old 90's paging style" (even though it works better)

    Really, paging through 15 pages of posts is your idea of better? I prefer infiniscroll and Discourse does it right. It might take a while to scroll the whole thread but it's much much much much better than clicking the stupid pages thing.

    http://australianbusinessclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/TAOLife-henry-Ford-if-i-had-asked-my-customer-what-they-wanted-they-would-have-said-a-faster-horse-henry-ford-quote-taolife.jpg



  • IMO people who are championing moving to a "traditional" forum would quickly find themselves missing discourse, even if they would never admit it. Maybe not blakeyrat, but definitely the anti-infiniscroll crowd.


  • FoxDev

    @Eldelshell said:

    I prefer infiniscroll

    I thought I didn't, but I've gotten used to it, and it actually does work well.

    When it works 😄


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @cartman82 said:

    IMO people who are championing moving to a "traditional" forum would quickly find themselves missing discourse, even if they would never admit it. Maybe not blakeyrat, but definitely the anti-infiniscroll crowd.

    Whether they would or not, I'm sure I would. There are lots of weird things about Discourse, but damned if it doesn't make it easy to quickly bang out a post. Just keep your complaints about mobile off my lawn.


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said:

    Just keep your complaints about mobile off my lawn.

    We'd rather put them on Atwood's lawn anyway 😄


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    I like how active the forums have gotten >.>



  • @redwizard said:

    As for the intentional bugs, infiniscroll (as one example) isn't limited to this forum. Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook who have millions of subscribers use this "feature" too, so I don't see us realistically convincing Jeff to stop using it - especially if his target customer audience are PHBs who want the look and feel of a Facebook or LinkedIn, not "old 90's paging style" (even though it works better).

    Except Facebook's scroll bar, AFAICT, actually works in telling me where I am in the feed; thought I don't think you ever jump to the middle of the scroll like in a forum, but the unloading of posts that were loaded is not a feature no matter what Jeff says.



  • @rad131304 said:

    Except Facebook's scroll bar, AFAICT, actually works in telling me where I am in the feed; thought I don't think you ever jump to the middle of the scroll like in a forum, but the unloading of posts that were loaded is not a feature no matter what Jeff says.

    In one sense I'd agree. It makes it impossible to use the web browser's search. In another sense, do you really want to load the entire {likes | status} thread just to see @accalia 's latest avatar qualms? Especially on mobile...



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    In one sense I'd agree. It makes it impossible to use the web browser's search. In another sense, do you really want to load the entire {likes | status} thread just to see @accalia 's latest avatar qualms? Especially on mobile...

    I don't mind NOT loading posts you skipped past, but you can make a reasonable guess as to how tall those posts are. How about just a default height empty div? It would make the scrollbar a lot less jumpy and useless.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @rad131304 said:

    I don't mind NOT loading posts you skipped past, but you can make a reasonable guess as to how tall those posts are. How about just a default height empty div? It would make the scrollbar a lot less jumpy and useless.

    No, you really can't. Every time someone rants about this aspect of the infini-scroll bar, I get this really weird feeling, because usually it's me telling people to get off my lawn. I really don't get the rage about this.



  • I s'pose.

    TBH, I rarely use the scrollbars anymore.

    (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) (menu-bar-mode -1)


  • @boomzilla said:

    No, you really can't. Every time someone rants about this aspect of the infini-scroll bar, I get this really weird feeling, because usually it's me telling people to get off my lawn. I really don't get the rage about this.

    I don't get rage about it either; it was just an obvious example of something that should work but doesn't. I don't have a good solution, but that doesn't make it not a problem. I've accepted that it doesn't work and probably never will, and I just don't try and use it anymore. I'm fine with the infiniscroll.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @rad131304 said:

    I don't get rage about it either; it was just an obvious example of something that should work but doesn't.

    Not that you in particular were raging, but others definitely have.

    I disagree about that, too. It does work. Just not how you think it should. Some people just want to complain. I imagine if it worked the way these guys think it should, their complaints would reverse.

    The fucking scrollbar guesses wrong and then it goddamned pauses while more stuff is loaded or unloaded. Just let the browser do its job and scroll based on what's there.

    OK, that's an exaggeration, but probably not by too much.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Not that you in particular were raging, but others definitely have.

    I disagree about that, too. It does work. Just not how you think it should. Some people just want to complain. I imagine if it worked the way these guys think it should, their complaints would reverse.

    The fucking scrollbar guesses wrong and then it goddamned pauses while more stuff is loaded or unloaded. Just let the browser do its job and scroll based on what's there.

    OK, that's an exaggeration, but probably not by too much.

    Fair enough; though it seems to behave in a strange enough way that it was a significant topic of discussion here for a while. Though the problems people complained about are conflated with unloading of DOM elements (which IMO is too aggressive), which is probably the real issue. IIRC we relaxed DOM unloading and things got a bit better. Like I said, I don't have good solution.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @rad131304 said:

    IIRC we relaxed DOM unloading and things got a bit better.

    We found a better compromise between waiting for network operations and making the browser hold too much stuff in memory.



  • @redwizard said:

    Win95 would take 5 minutes to load on my Pentium 60.

    That seems doubtful. It doesn't even take 5 minutes for Windows 95 to boot on a 386.



  • @boomzilla said:

    We found a better compromise between waiting for network operations and making the browser hold too much stuff in memory.

    Yeah, basically what I was going for in a super simplistic explanation. I suspected it might have been a more complicated improvement.

    And having just played with scrolling on this thread, it does seem to work much better than it did before. I recall it unloading if something was like 2 pages away which was super annoying.


  • FoxDev

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    TBH, I rarely use the scrollbars anymore.

    i leave them enabled....because sometimes someone braks discourse so bad that none of the keyboard navigation works and i have to use the scroll bar to get past their post.

    last time i remember that happening was when we discovered the <big> abuse



  • @rad131304 said:

    Except Facebook's scroll bar, AFAICT, actually works in telling me where I am in the feed



  • @Eldelshell said:

    Even a broken clock is right twice a day.


  • kills Dumbledore

    Not if it's digital and the display is broken so it says it's 88:88 AMPM



  • Like I've said a million times, I don't have anything particularly against infinite scrolling. My gripe is against BROKEN UI ELEMENTS.

    If this forum had infinite scrolling and a working scrollbar, fine. If it didn't infinitely scroll and had a working scrollbar, fine. What bothers me is a NON-WORKING SCROLLBAR.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    What bothers me is a NON-WORKING SCROLLBAR.

    That's cool...I agree. And the scrollbar works for me on Discourse, so we're good, then.



  • This post is deleted!


  • @BC_Programmer said:

    That seems doubtful. It doesn't even take 5 minutes for Windows 95 to boot on a 386.

    Then perhaps something was wrong with my Pentium 60? It came with Win 3.11 when I bought it in '94. When I upgraded to Win95 in '96, it took so long I timed it. Just over 5 minutes.

    EDIT: Win 3.11, IIRC, loaded in about 20 seconds.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Eldelshell said:

    child's drawing

    Pulling out a fictitious quote by a man who was out competed by people who did listen to their customers? Billant.

    "The real lesson learned was not that that Ford’s failure was one of not listening to his customers, but of his refusal to continuously test his vision against reality, which led to the Ford Motor Company’s failure of continuous innovation, resulting in a catastrophic loss of market share from which it never recovered."

    Also, I can invent quotes too:

    "Discourse sucks, and all possible Universes are worse for it existing" - Alfred "Noble" Einstein, inventor of the Atom



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    Billant

    ❓



  • Infiniscroll is not superior to paging the way cars are superior to horses no matter how you cut it. It's change for the sake of change, not a revolutionary "improvement." Leave the strawman out of this.

    Also, horses work much better through paths in forests than any car. We just don't have many forests left after redecorating our planet. ;-)

    Anyhow, when implemented correctly, Infiniscroll is competitive to paging in terms of function. But even on LinkedIn where it works well, I've been in threads with hundreds of posts. It does slow down after a point, which it wouldn't do if it paged at the 50 post mark. I'm just stating an opinion based on having used both. If you prefer a continuous stream of consciousness rather than a click to another page, fine.



  • I want pages that are 10k posts long.


  • FoxDev

    @aliceif said:

    I want pages that are 10k posts long.

    With fa-spin on every element


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Ah, so much wrong.

    @redwizard said:

    Infiniscroll is not superior to paging the way cars are superior to horses no matter how you cut it. It's change for the sake of change, not a revolutionary "improvement." Leave the strawman out of this.

    No, I wouldn't rate cars vs horses the same as infiniscroll vs paging, but so what? It's better in some ways.

    @redwizard said:

    We just don't have many forests left after redecorating our planet.

    We have a lot of forests. Especially since we've gotten so much better at farming. And feeding the trees doesn't seem to be hurting them, either.



  • @redwizard said:

    As for the intentional bugs, infiniscroll (as one example) isn't limited to this forum. Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook who have millions of subscribers use this "feature" too

    [1]The difference being that they don't just unload everything from the DOM. At least for Facebook, it looks like they unload the data from the DOM, but maintain the space it occupied. As a result, the scrollbar there at least gives a pretty reasonable estimation of where you are compared to what you've viewed. Discourse, OTOH, unloads posts as you move deeper down the rabbit hole. This means that the scroll bar is only accurate for the first "chunk" of a topic (for us I think that means posts 1-30).

    Now, since Discourse will load you into the middle of the topic, this does present certain challenges. The compromise I would suggest is: Have the scroll bar sized relative to where you started in the topic.

    tl;dr: You can have infiniscroll and a working scrollbar. Discourse says "belgium the scrollbar".

    [1] I haven't really paid much attention on LinkedIn, since I'm rarely there. I did just check on facebook however, and this seems fairly accurate.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lorne_Kates said:

    The real lesson learned was not that that Ford’s failure was one of not listening to his customers

    That is an impressively-poorly-written sentence.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @redwizard said:

    We just don't have many forests left after redecorating our planet.

    Depends on where you look. Wisconsin's more forested now than it was before they started doing industrial logging.



  • @boomzilla said:

    No, I wouldn't rate cars vs horses the same as infiniscroll vs paging, but so what? It's better in some ways

    Maybe I need to spell it out (or I'm overly sensitive to being trolled today, I don't know):

    Paging is better than Infiniscroll, in my opinion. Your results may vary. To me, Infiniscroll isn't a deal-breaker. unless, as blakey says:

    @blakeyrat said:

    My gripe is against BROKEN UI ELEMENTS.

    Anyhow, I was more open to the discussion and the concept back in August 2014 when I suddenly found I could actually log on and communicate in TDWTF forum again, which is akin to a kid going on his first high from sniffing white-out - what did I know? I had a voice again! Discourse, Infiniscroll with broken elements - bring it on!

    TBH, sites like LinkedIn used Infiniscroll long before I encountered it here. You know what? I didn't really notice, except the annoyance I mentioned of things slowing down past a certain point. Paging doesn't annoy me.

    Having thought about it for a bit, I could see where some people could maybe argue that they lose their train of thought when they have to click NEXT to load the next page and lose the previous posts. Perhaps someone else could list other arguments on how Infiniscroll is better?



  • I read a lot on a tablet. There i10l seems more natural.

    On desktop, I can read an entire thread using only spacebar, never having to reach for the mouse.

    That, in my book, are two plusses for i10l


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @redwizard said:

    My gripe is against BROKEN UI ELEMENTS.

    I know. I call bullshit on that, too. He wants to break the scroll bar, IMO. I'm just counter ranting, because that's how I roll.



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    i10l

    WaaaT?



  • Told you. On tablet. Also trying to help my daughter with her english homework, so I took a shortcut. What starts with an i, has 10 characters in the middle, ends with an l, and has to do with infiniscroll?



  • I t3k t1e w3e a10g by n5s t3g is s4d.


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said:

    I t3k t1e w3e a10g by n5s t3g is s4d.

    <!-- I think the whole abbreviating by numbers thing is stupid. -->


    But it could make for a fun @Sockbot module 😆



  • Yes mistress Knight of Ancient Study of Furries and Anthros, I shall appear as summoned.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    What starts with an i, has 10 characters in the middle, ends with an l, and has to do with infiniscroll?

    You have a weird way of spelling "fucking bullshit"

    #f14t


  • FoxDev



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    I like how active the forums have gotten >.>

    Discourse is a barrier to barriers to posting... wait, what?



  • @rad131304 said:

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:
    In one sense I'd agree. It makes it impossible to use the web browser's search. In another sense, do you really want to load the entire {likes | status} thread just to see @accalia 's latest avatar qualms? Especially on mobile...

    I don't mind NOT loading posts you skipped past, but you can make a reasonable guess as to how tall those posts are. How about just a default height empty div? It would make the scrollbar a lot less jumpy and useless.

    I actually wouldn't mind having some fine-tuned control on how many posts are loaded for a given topic, configurable per-device. On a desktop PC, I might have it preload the first 100 posts of a topic and keep the entire DOM in memory so it's super quick to scroll around, whereas on mobile, I may only keep 5 or so posts resident for a smaller memory footprint (but slower navigation throughout the whole thread...)



  • @boomzilla said:

    No, you really can't. Every time someone rants about this aspect of the infini-scroll bar, I get this really weird feeling, because usually it's me telling people to get off my lawn. I really don't get the rage about this.

    I'm having fun imaging some super-angry guy with a tape measure pressed up against his monitor, scrolling a discourse topic up and down, and screaming abuse at the screeen—"The scrollbar slider is now 1½" tall you retards!. It should never be more than ⅞!!!. FFFFFFUUUUUU"


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @tar said:

    I'm having fun imaging some super-angry guy with a tape measure pressed up against his monitor


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place


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