Closed Poll: How do you feel about Discourse on TDWTF?



  • @codinghorror said:

    (it is weird the Ember.js community was not better at this with their Discourse instance.)

    Those guys are open source JavaScript developers. Most of us work for a living.



  • How can I view who voted for what? Is that option not available? I am remembering that option was available in vBulletin based forums like arguewitheveryone.com Do not go to that link.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Nagesh said:

    How can I view who voted for what?

    Discourse is buggy. Find one of its many bugs, exploit it, and grab the database.

    @Nagesh said:

    I am remembering that option was available in vBulletin based forums

    You're wrong for wanting an option that exists in a {spit on floor} FORUM! Go to hell. You are wrong about everything and everything you want is wrong.



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    Discourse is buggy. Find one of its many bugs, exploit it, and grab the database.

    @Nagesh said:

    I am remembering that option was available in vBulletin based forums

    You're wrong for wanting an option that exists in a {spit on floor} FORUM! Go to hell. You are wrong about everything and everything you want is wrong.

    My horrorscope tells me that I just cannot be wrong on anything at all. I am born on right cusp under right stars and in right year.

    Nice channelizing by the way!



  • @Nagesh said:

    My horrorscope tells me that I just cannot be wrong right on anything at all.

    FTFY



  • @abarker said:

    @Nagesh said:
    My horrorscope tells me that I just cannot be wrong right on anything at all.

    FTFY

    Your version must be the correct one, otherwise, why call it a "horroRscope"?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Nagesh said:

    How can I view who voted for what? Is that option not available?

    There is (currently) no facility available to do that.


  • :belt_onion:

    @codinghorror said:

    There is a reason I am here.

    And good news @skotl, once we get all the major bugs and issues worked out, there will no longer be a reason for me to be here. That could take up to two months though, realistically, you guys are awfully good at uncovering problems in software. Maybe a little too good?

    If you continued to make it through entire threads without oneboxing useless memes and youtube videos, and without modding/splitting all our posts, I doubt people will actively desire your exit like they do now.

    This is the first thread in which I've found your posts tolerable to read. And I'm finally getting the impression that you want to be here to actively better your software, rather than just to fight the users about how to use it. I imagine that's probably how you've felt about your time here all along, but it has been hard to tell with the constant meme trolling.

    On topic, I voted that I don't care either way. I mostly lurked on the old forums (maybe 30 posts in 5 years), so the biggest complaints for me related more to readability and navigation, most of which have been slowly whittled away. There's still some annoyances, but not as much to actively irritate me like before.

    Also... clicking the new topic link branch from PJH: "So then, I decide to take the plunge and...17" dropped me into the middle of that topic rather than at the top where I would have expected? I don't remember reading that thread before, but maybe I had. Either way, it seems like there needs to be a way to drop into the top of a topic instead of the first new post if you weren't clicking a "new posts in old/new topic" link.



  • Personally I don't care either way. It's like anal warts, one day they arrive and there's nothing you can do except either accept their existence and move on or get angry about something you can't do much about.



  • @darkmatter said:

    clicking the new topic link branch from PJH: "So then, I decide to take the plunge and...17" dropped me into the middle of that topic rather than at the top where I would have expected

    That's because @PJH linked to a specific post in the topic and not just the topic itself. That takes you directly to the post, regardless of what your last unread post is in the topic.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    Also... clicking the new topic link branch from PJH: "So then, I decide to take the plunge and...17" dropped me into the middle of that topic rather than at the top where I would have expected?

    That wasn't a "Reply as new Topic" away from here - that was a linked-to post (within that post) in another topic (specifically the post you were directed to.) Specifically, an example of Jeff fucking around with other people's posts not in Meta.



  • Maybe another FAQ post as to what the links on the right mean based on the arrow symbols? Of course, something like this (and what else you've posted) should really be part of a standard Discourse FAQ.

    I know the arrow pointing right means either a quote or a link in the post refers to the listed topic (and if it is a quote, the quote will also have an arrow pointing right instead of pointing up like in-topic quotes).

    Arrow pointing left means a post in another topic quoted or linked to the specified post.

    I'm not sure what shows for "reply as new topic", though I assume it's just an arrow pointing right don't know why I thought it would point right now that I think about it, it points left.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ChaosTheEternal said:

    I'm not sure what shows for "reply as new topic", though I assume it's just an arrow pointing right.

    Arrow pointing left, it would appear. Simply because it contains a link in the first post. As you said:

    @ChaosTheEternal said:

    Arrow pointing left means a post in another topic quoted or linked to the specified post.



  • @PJH said:

    There is (currently) no facility available to do that.

    That is sad part. We will now not know the true opines of other folks on this site.



  • @Nagesh said:

    That is sad part. We will now not know the true opines of other folks on this site.

    In the civilized world, people vote anonymously so that dictators can't coerce your vote.

    Filed Under: Vote against discourse and lose 100 points on Stack Overflow!


  • :belt_onion:

    @PJH said:

    That wasn't a "Reply as new Topic" away from here - that was a linked-to post (within that post) in another topic (specifically the post you were directed to.) Specifically, an example of Jeff fucking around with other people's posts not in Meta.

    Got it, I was supposed to be lost and confused.
    Working as Designed.



  • You know what? All that arrow points left, arrow points right,light grey, dark grey, posts pointing in and out (is that the arrows?), invites, stars, shares etc is a mess, ironically, of UI design.

    It's is all so non-discoverable, counter-intuitive and just plain unnecessary. Discourse is a mess of feature piled on feature for which I see little discernible reason.

    Honestly; what's wrong with topics, posts, tags, categories. The end. Why do we need all this other shit?



  • @skotl said:

    You know what? All that arrow points left, arrow points right,light grey, dark grey, posts pointing in and out (is that the arrows?), invites, stars, shares etc is a mess, ironically, of UI design.

    It's is all so non-discoverable, counter-intuitive and just plain unnecessary. Discourse is a mess of feature piled on feature for which I see little discernible reason.

    Honestly; what's wrong with topics, posts, tags, categories. The end. Why do we need all this other shit?

    To quote the great master:



  • Exactly.

    Now that the threads (and posts) are piling up, I find the entire site very difficult to navigate.

    I'm not looking for a how-to / faq; my point is that most forums are intuitive. This is not.



  • We are world's largest democracy. So don't tell me about voting. I am born to vote.

    I want very high rep on stackoverflow. So please come and upvote me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @skotl said:

    I'm not looking for a how-to / faq;

    Given the distinct lack of them else-web, no-one else is either....

    Working on a post display one anyway.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Nagesh said:

    So please come and upvote me.

    I can't imagine how this could possibly go wrong....



  • @DrakeSmith said:

    In the civilized world, people vote anonymously so that dictators can't coerce your vote.

    This. I would be less likely to vote in (at least some) polls if people could see how I voted. "Likes" are publicly visible. I know I have, in a few cases, not "liked" posts that I liked because I didn't necessarily want certain admins to associate me with a particularly strident Dicourse- or admin-bashing.


  • :belt_onion:

    @chubertdev said:

    To quote the great master:

    Nice find. New game, argue with @codinghorror by quoting/linking his own blog posts against him!

    Granted, that post is 8 years old. I mean, 32px x 32px icons have come a long way since then, right?



  • @darkmatter said:

    I mean, 32px x 32px icons have come a long way since then, right?

    Sure, but that icon is only 20px X 20px.

    Edit: This is 32x32.



  • That's not a floppy disk, this is a floppy disk.



  • @chubertdev said:

    That's not a floppy dick, this is a floppy dick.

    You can get pills for that now I hear.


  • Banned

    @rad131304 said:

    What I don't feel compelling is the "no portion of any meta discussion shall be allowed to exist as part of another topic ever" decree.

    That decree is imaginary; what I actually propose is that any extended meta digression be moved to meta. 4 or 5 posts? Fine, topics have some variability. 20+ meta posts buried in the middle or a topic -- or dominating the topic so overwhelmingly that it is a meta topic now -- those should be split.

    @abarker said:

    how Discourse displays the two

    It is a bit more subtle than that; bbcode is translated into HTML, and whether there is a cr lf after the bbcode quote tag apparently matters when it should not. This does not happen when quoting with Markdown, which is also a lot less characters e.g. > -- but doesn't let you display user, topic, etc with the quote.

    But in this case it was a bare quote anyway.



  • @codinghorror said:

    That decree is imaginary; what I actually propose is that any extended meta digression be moved to meta. 4 or 5 posts? Fine, topics have some variability. 20+ meta posts buried in the middle or a topic -- or dominating the topic so overwhelmingly that it is a meta topic now -- those should be split.

    Ok, I can understand where you're coming from - I could be convinced to meet halfway on it and be fine if it wasn't moved until the conversation concluded. I know we have the thread that must not be named in the old forumn, but rarely do topics go on for more than a couple of days. It's the arbitrariness of the level of where it gets moved that bothers me ... maybe partially because at around 20 posts is probably when that conversation is just heating up because it is interesting and having it moved is just, IMO, needlessly annoying.


  • Considered Harmful

    @faoileag said:

    @rad131304 said:
    For me it feels like you're that manager who shows up one day and decides that functions can't be longer than 5 lines and spends a month editing everyone's work to fit an arbitrary "standard" while yelling at people "you're doing it wrong". A

    I had a manager like that once and let me tell you, it was no laughing matter!

    I've been a manager like that once and let me tell you, a consistently formatted codebase takes an order of magnitude less effort to read and understand.

    Well, I wasn't that bad, I generally will only clean up formatting when I'm refactoring something worthy of posting here already. (Which is like every other day.)



  • @error said:

    @faoileag said:
    I had a manager like that once and let me tell you, it was no laughing matter!

    I've been a manager like that once and let me tell you, a consistently formatted codebase takes an order of magnitude less effort to read and understand.

    Full ack - it's an occasional problem with the code base I'm currently working on and yes, broken formatting is a pita.

    The case I had in mind was different, though. The person in question had read somewhere that method X, which could be called X() or X(parent), should not be called without the parameter.

    So he tasked someone with replacing all occurrences of X() in the codebase with X(parent).

    This introduced a quite a few bugs. In one case, he replaced obj.X() with obj.X(obj), something we only detected three months after the changes were made.

    I had been on a vaccation when the decree had been issued, and on my first day back at work was greeted with "your code doesn't work any more".

    Turned out that the person tasked with replacing the method calls didn't bother to check if the method in question - X() - had been overloaded. In my case, I had overloaded X() but nox X(parent), since passing the parent didn't make much sense in that use case. So, after the refactoring, the code in my overloaded X() was never executed, as it did not exist in X(parent). And the module didn't work as expected any more.

    Lessons learned:

    1. Enforcing some policy changes retrospectively might create more problems than it solves.
    2. Program defensively against future changes. If you overload X(), also overload X(parent). Even if it doesn't make sense to you.

  • 🚽 Regular

    @ChaosTheEternal said:

    don't know why I thought it would point right now that I think about it, it points left.

    You probably thought something like "it's a new topic branching out of this one".



  • @darkmatter said:

    I imagine that's probably how you've felt about your time here all along, but it has been hard to tell with the constant meme trolling.

    It's a little ironc that we're criticising @codinghorror for trolling on a forum where the rest of us make a regular habit out of trolling the shit out of each other.

    Is it really so inappropriate to suggest that perhaps Jeff could both be a Discourse founder and a regular member of the community and engage in the banter/trolling should he so choose?

    I'm reminded of the little exchange that this comment kicked off which was a bit of fun for all involved. Do the rest of you somehow lose the capacity to figure out the difference between a bit of trolling for humour's sake and genuine derision as soon as you read a post from @sam or @codinghorror?

    If I remember correctly, one of the first replies when Jeff posted for the first time was saying that we troll pretty much all the time. Seems to me he's just trying to fit in.



  • I think the difference is: It's fun to troll about crap that doesn't actually matter.

    When people are genuinely annoyed (about some great community members leaving for example) and Jeff has to power to help or at least commiserate and instead chooses to mock, THAT is what sucks.

    The Daily WTF community are total assholes to each other, but in a friendly way, and I never see someone being mocked or trolled over "real" things. (Like when someone shares a workplace horror story, they tend to get sympathy, not mocked).



  • @KillaCoder said:

    The Daily WTF community are total assholes to each other, but in a friendly way, and I never see someone being mocked or trolled over "real" things. (Like when someone shares a workplace horror story, they tend to get sympathy, not mocked).

    So right. And I would even go so far as to say this community is actually not as bad as it occassionally sees itself.

    I have seen worse. Much worse.



  • For a community pretty much without restraint, it is remarkably civilized.

    Even with the all the intolerant liberals around here.

    Filed Under: I kid, I kid, the liberals here are some of the most tolerant I've known



  • @KillaCoder said:

    When people are genuinely annoyed (about some great community members leaving for example) and Jeff has to power to help or at least commiserate and instead chooses to mock, THAT is what sucks.

    The only time I see him memeing is when people are bitching about the same thing for the n+1th time after he's already addressed it civilly previously. Perhaps not in the one thread, but when you read the 300th post ranting about infinite scrolling or <insert other feature tdwtf doesn't like here> it's understandable he might be a bit less than serious.

    I'm also feeling a bit charitable because it seems like @codinghorror and @sam are copping most of the flak from us when really, it was @apapadimoulis who selected Discourse. We're all ranting at @codinghorror but he's not the one who chooses whether we use this system or not, so perhaps if we really want a truck that badly (not making a case for or against that), we should blame the guy who went to the car dealership in the first place instead of the car salesman who is trying to do the best he can given the circumstances.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    This. I would be less likely to vote in (at least some) polls if people could see how I voted. "Likes" are publicly visible. I know I have, in a few cases, not "liked" posts that I liked because I didn't necessarily want certain admins to associate me with a particularly strident Dicourse- or admin-bashing.

    Why are you slithering away? Vote freely and don't be scared.
    Nobody can tell who HardwareGeek is. You are also online persona like everyone else; what is called an alternative identity in web slang.

    Filed Under: Nagesh uses a semi-colon.



  • @PJH said:

    I can't imagine how this could possibly go wrong....

    Who is this guy? I am certain he is downvoted me just today only.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Nagesh said:

    Who is this guy?

    Dunno, but they're 282 miles and 4½ hrs drive away from me.



  • @PJH said:

    Dunno, but they're 282 miles and 4½ hrs drive away from me.

    You can't be too far away from me (unless you're going through a certain tunnel).

    Tell me how far you are from York and I'll triangulate your position and come and stalk you.



  • I guess Newcastle!



  • Send beer immediately.


    Filed under: There is a mini keg of broon in my fridge right now


  • @subscript_error said:

    Send beer immediately.

    Why aye man!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Keith said:

    Why aye man!

    Apropos of not a great deal, I was sent this earlier. Knowing the locals as I do, it made I larf...

     2. “Big market.”

    What it usually means: a large area of public commerce.

    What it means in Newcastle: the vomit-splashed, charva-invested tenth circle of hell (better known as ‘Bigg Market’).

    [...]

     11. “Bubble.”

    What it usually means: a sphere of gas surrounded by a liquid

    What it means in Newcastle: what you did like a bairn in 2009 when the Toon were relegated.

    Apologies to anyone who doesn't live in the UK, (or even for those that do and don't know WTF this article is about.)



  • @PJH said:

    @Nagesh said:
    Who is this guy? I am certain he is downvoted me just today only.
    ;

    Dunno, but they're 282 miles and 4½ hrs drive away from me.

    Hmmm... the description on the right might give a hint... and the county as well...



  • Ah, Newcastle... a night out in '89... and a disco... I think on Quayside...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @faoileag said:

    I think on Quayside...

    Not much in the way of night life on the actual Quayside any more - it's mainly businesses.

    And the Court. Naturally, an above average number of the businesses are lawyers. And a Greggs™.

    Friday appears to be chav day at the court from my observations when having a cig outside my office.



  • @PJH said:

    Not much in the way of night life on the actual Quayside any more

    25 years can do a lot... (26 actually, got the year wrong). Anyway, I was more or less guessing Quayside to begin with, we started in a pub earlier on that evening ;-)



  • You'll never persuade me that UI elements that fade in and out of existence(*) depending on the position of the mouse cursor are a good idea. Hell, even scroll bars that appear and disappear depending on whether there is enough content to be scrollable are questionable, because until there is a scrollable amount of content, you can't tell if the display area is scrollable.

    (*) You probably think I mean "visibility" here. I don't. I mean "existence". It's a UI element. If it isn't visible, it doesn't exist. If it's not usable at the moment (e.g. Delete-Selected-Items when nothing is selected), grey it out (but so that it remains visible). If it belongs to a zone that is not where the cursor is, you might de-emphasise it, but leave it clearly visible.

    OK, it isn't as bad as UI hot-zones that aren't ever distinguishable from the background (e.g. the Win8 Modern interface hot corners), but it's pretty bad.


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