I'm still a grumpy cat: a final plea to Alex
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You need to remember, the Discourse team played no part in this decision to change the forum software.
If you can find some way to put this in big angry red letters somewhere I think it would do absolutely nothing to direct people's irrational rage in the right direction but it would be a valiant attempt. Plus the angry posts about the big red angry text would be hilarious and feed my schadenfreude.
Seriously though, you guys have my sympathy. @apapadimoulis kinda threw you under the bus here.
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I thought it was sort of a mutual thing rather than Alex just deciding to go with Discourse - I cannot, for one moment, believe Jeff didn't say something to the effect of "your forum sucks, come try ours". That's not an indictment or a negative opinion, no matter how it might appear - because I know full well I might have tried the same stunt under slightly different circumstances.
And while we (I say we, but I was late to the party) could have forgiven for the move to Discourse on its own, a non-trivial part of the problem has been Jeff showing up and trying to shape conversations in the way he feels appropriate.
That's a problem because Jeff wasn't, as far as I could tell, actively part of the community beforehand and is trying to change the use case to fit his toolset, in preference to adapting the toolset to fit the use case. This community functions firmly on snark, on in-jokes, and even while being jokey and snarky, generally respectful of the rest of the community.
This community is never going to accept 'civilised discourse' in the way Discourse is intended. We're all way too bitter and jaded from dealing with stupid for that.
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I thought it was sort of a mutual thing rather than Alex just deciding to go with Discourse
I think you're probably right.
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/vote-of-no-confidence/270/87
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I thought it was sort of a mutual thing rather than Alex just deciding to go with Discourse - I cannot, for one moment, believe Jeff didn't say something to the effect of "your forum sucks, come try ours".
I think you're probably right.
I'm sure Jeff did say that. Fact of the matter is though, Alex could just have easily had said "sorry, your product doesn't align with the requirements of my community as in this thread [insert link to that thread in CS here] so maybe next time." It's his site and his call.
I don't think at any point Alex had a gun to his head over this. It was his decision to move ahead with a product that didn't match the community's desire and the fact that his friends offered a suggestion doesn't mean he couldn't knock it back. It's also not in the Discourse team's best interest to implement a product for a community whose core requirement was "no infinite scrolling."
Jeff & Co. don't run WTF (or at least, I don't think they do, their work on the original site notwithstanding) and I'm sure there have been a few moments when @codinghorror has been on the verge of posting "Well go use a different fucking forum software then," and has instead posted a cute cat picture. Respect to him and @sam for staying as civil as they have, I know I couldn't do it in this situation.
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Given enough time, I think all those are more or less possible except #1.
After having had a closer look at the structure of the DOM as Discourse delivers it, it might be possible that @codinghorror is right here - at least in the interpretation of "impossible" as "extremely difficult" (what I take to be @sam's stand).The paginated version for non-javascript use is served in a
<noscript>tag in the body. Yes, all the contents of a paginated page (this might actually make a nice sidebar wtf).The page as delivered to Javascript users is an Ember app. It is (at least from my quick glance) completely separated from the paginated content. It doesn't even reuse what is already there but seems to reload the content when needed.
So, if an Ember app doesn't offer pagination out-of-the-box, it might be rather difficult to implement on top of it. If we are talking real, bookmarkable pagination here.
I don't know Ember so I can't tell if Ember is a good choice as front-end framework for a forum. I would definitely have chosen a different approach to implement an AJAX-driven forum software.
But I try not to be one of those people who only know two ways of doing things: their way and the wrong way. Therefore, all I'm saying here is: in my eyes, a forum software that is not fully functional without javascript is, even in 2014, and at least to a certain degree, broken.
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It's also not in the Discourse team's best interest to implement a product for a community whose core requirement was "no infinite scrolling."
I don't believe that really is a core requirement of this community. Except for Lorne, but there we need it just so we can get past the diatribes. ;)What we do look forward to is getting past the trial-by-fire stage. DC is a lot better than it was, but is still rather too heavy on the CPU usage in the client. I don't read it when without wall power (for various unrelated reasons) but it's worrying when a mere discussion site manages to suck battery power faster than Eclipse normally does. (This might be related to the @PaulaBean rampage…)
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I don't believe that really is a core requirement of this community. Except for Lorne, but there we need it just so we can get past the diatribes.
Yeah, I'm just referring back to the RFC thread (not that I participated, or have even read it) in the old forums and what it supposedly said about most people saying no to infiniscroll. Can't be arsed checking it out now though, gotta be up early tomorrow and it's 11:30 here. :/
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That's a problem because Jeff wasn't, as far as I could tell, actively part of the community beforehand
He wasn't.
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More than just broken. It actively limits who can use Discourse. There's quite a big thing in a lot of countries now about discrimination against users with disabilities. Certainly governmental websites are supposed to function at least usably for users with disabilities - and to a point that means turning off the fancy JS and autoreflowing content and stuff like that. Fortunately Discourse does score points in some respects by having things being big hittable targets since motor control is a recognised issue too.
I dread to think how anyone using any of the text to speech tools would struggle with Discourse.
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That's a problem because Jeff wasn't, as far as I could tell, actively part of the community beforehand
He wasn't.
Only in spirit.
I must be new here, but...
I think Alex should start thinking about moving this forum to Discuss... or maybe he hates Atwood, lot of people do.
Make sure it's initialized!
@nonpartisan said:here Wow Atwood's a dumbass and so are his readers. 1) He doesn't mention a single positive aspect of the Registry, probably because he's entirely ignorant of why it's there or what features it enables. He could have researched this by t...
An open MySQL bug now has a birthday cake
@morbiuswilters said:I remember when Jeff Atwood was like "I'm going to add NOLOCK to every single query on Stack Overflow!" *sigh*@Jeff Atwood said:But in practice adding nolock to queries that you absolutely know are simple, straightforward read-only ...
Recruiting Windows Store developers
@joe.edwards said:Joel Spolsky (who I'll agree jumped the shark years ago)I find it hard to take anything Jeff Atwood takes seriously, even when he's 100% correct. He likely jumped the shark even before Spolsky did.
Heroku
@Soviut said:Thousands of successful, high profile sites are powered by it. Basecamp, Hulu, SlideShare, GitHub, Shopify, Zendesk, etc. Twitter. Oh,wait.. And Basecamp? SlideShare? Shopify? Zendesk? Fuck, I hadn't even heard of the last 3. And Basecamp is ...
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More than just broken. It actively limits who can use Discourse. There's quite a big thing in a lot of countries now about discrimination against users with disabilities. Certainly governmental websites are supposed to function at least usably for users with disabilities
I tried to be not too critical this time :-) But yes, in its current stage, Discourse is unfit for use by governmental websites and businesses who need to be inclusive.And I wouldn't be surprised at all if a website using Discourse would be charged with discriminating against the visually impaired, who can read the discussions, but can not take part.
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Not one post where someone speaks positively of him?
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I dread to think how anyone using any of the text to speech tools would struggle with Discourse.
It works. Sort of. The part that really seems to throw it is usernames; @faoileag appears to be the Worst of the Worst for this, as it really throws the TTS engine, pushing it back into “spell it out” mode. (Some of the time. Not consistently.)
What's missing is the rendering of the controls, but you'd want to use a different stylesheet for that (and actually CSS supports the capability via media type specialisation) so it wouldn't be at all insuperable. As long as you've got a good semantic markup of the underlying content, you can do the rest. (Assume that better audio-based browsers can do JS, and that worse ones are of SSDS-level usability for the modern world.)
Filed under: Text-to-speech isn't too great at getting inflections right yet.
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I just realized something cool.
Alex could make the whole site out of Discourse, if he wanted, just by having thedailywtf.com/ point at "today's" story/thread. And then we'd have all of the nice social features, site wide, instead of having to go into the forums.
I don't know how hard migrating old articles would be, though.
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Alex could make the whole site out of Discourse
You really want to get bashed don't you?
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No, he genuinely doesn't understand the backlash, not even against infiniscrolling.
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the backlash [...] against infiniscrolling.
Well, what is the difference between infiniscrolling and pagination? Basically, pagination requires you to click a button to load the next set of posts. If you want, I could write a plugin that pops up a
confirm()box every time Discourse wants to load more posts.
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Do we really have to go through this again? Has it not already been done to death enough that you want me to repeat it all, only for a smug dismissal (again) that my opinions are Luddite ones? Because I'd rather not waste both our time on the matter.
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Here's my three thoughts on this thread (and everything else that has preceded it)
- The majority of discussion on this site is about Discourse aka "the platform", which is crazy and shows how half-baked that platform is, which leads me to...
- Discourse is a counter-intuitive sludge of software. Some of the suggestions up above about how to use this feature or that feature to try and hack your way through the weeds highlights how difficult Discourse is to intuit and to use. It's fucking forum software - how can you make that hard?
- Blakey, Morbs, Lorne have all gone
This really has gone on for too long - @apapadimoulis seriously needs to take some brave pills and cut this thing off at the knees. Nobody is getting any benefit from the move and the community that we had is collapsing.
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No, he genuinely doesn't understand the backlash, not even against infiniscrolling.
I can only understand the vehemence of people like @Lorne_Kates as an allergic reaction to change. Or, @codinghorror ran over his dog. It was kind of fun to be indignant about change at first, especially with all of the bugs we were finding (I really thought Discourse was more mature than it was, though the types of things being found are getting more and more picayune). But now, it's kind of embarrassing. I sort of assume he's just keeping it up because he can't possibly back track after the fit he pitched.
At least @blakeyrat had the decency to stay away after his tantrums.
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What you're suggesting in this case makes zero sense. You already have an HTML-only interface;
I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I think it actually makes a lot of sense.
Blakey, Morbs, Lorne have all gone
I strongly feel that the major reason @Lorne_Kates @blakeyrat and morbs left is a bit deeper than simply pagination vs. non pagination so hear me out.
For some people all the fancy JavaScript nonsense is something they want to opt-out of. They don't use "the facebooks" and actively despise it, they don't care for change in the forum space and do not see a problem in the way stuff has run till now. The tools work, are battle tested and don't need changing.
They want a straight HTML interface into a forum, one that works on every GOD DAMN browser including mosaic 1.0 and is lightning fast. For these people, the wizardry, live reloading, notifications, fancy editor etc, is all noise.
Put in @codinghorror's word they want a Bus, not a Car.
At Discourse we are heavily committed to creating a JavaScript application, rendering happens in the frontend, JSON payloads are posted around as you click. This is a different beast to a straight HTML forum. It has its advantages and it has its disadvantages. But ... at the end of the day changing Discourse into a HTML app with JavaScript optional would be a major architectural change. One can also argue that making a bus/car is not really a great approach to take.
We are trying to keep focus around fixing our platform, improving perf, nailing bugs, improving usability and extensibility.
Many of the concerns @Lorne_Kates raised are not orthogonal to our design.
- Absolute vs. Relative times should be an admin level option
- Post counts underneath avatars or in the user card should be an admin level option. See also: https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-last-seen-and-post-count-to-user-card/16550/4
We are working hard to get a "Bug-free-ish experience", in fact this is our #1 priority at the moment. I feel we are making great progress and am extremely thankful this community are giving Discourse a good workout. I am also working very hard to accommodate even using plugins (for example the history spamming stuff)
That said, I feel there is a deeper problem here. Some people are just not into all the newfangled JavaScript crap. They want a straight HTML experience. On the upside, the Discourse object model is quite solid, providing a new frontend is something that could be done given resources, I think a plugin is the best approach for such an effort. It would also do good for Discourse as it would force cleanup around the object model. Our actual "noscript" implementation is probably less than 100 or so lines of code, we only have 3 or so views implemented as straight html, a lot is missing. Log in / Log out pages, composer and the list goes on.
I totally understand, telling people who want a bus, here is an engine a wrench, go build a bus is delirious. I don't really expect that. I just think that really, for some people, a JavaScript app is not what they want. No amount of lipstick on this car is going to turn it into a bus.
Now for people who are enthused about all this JavaScript wizardry and understand the limitations and advantages of this approach who's main objection is pagination. I strongly suggest taking time, and working on some sort of spec, ideally with screen shots, that outlines how this could work, hashing out ideas is the best way of making headway here.
I just feel that for many the underlying problem is not "there is no pagination", it is, "I don't like all this JavaScript wizardry"
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I'm really not sure I agree. Apologies for wall of words but that's just my style.
@blakeyrat was - even in his own words - not so much opposed to the upheaval from a paradigm shift, but because of how buggy things are, and he's possibly right that if you step back on the infiniscroll bandwagon a number of issues resolve themselves.
His objection is bugginess. Morbs seemed to be in the same camp. @Lorne_Kates's objections are two-fold. He's peeved about the bugginess especially after Alex was saying 'give it a few weeks' while Jeff was saying 'give it a few months'... My impression was that this was 0.9.x, i.e. late beta before the blessed 1.0 release. In which case, there should not be the number of bugs that there are. For a platform whose biggest selling point (infiniscroll) to be as fragile as we found it to be... it's a story worthy of TDWTF in its own right.
Then there's the XSS issues. On the one hand, it's because you seem to have this truly insane idea of how to handle user content (to allow some mutated hybrid of Markdown, bbcode and unsanitised HTML)... even if you were Markdown only I could sympathise with 'this is the one true content system' but it's not. Don't even get me started on the inconsistency of
[linktext](linkurl)versus[linktext][1]and a footnote type deal.OTOH, it also smells like newbiness. Yes, I'm sure any of us who've ever done a web app have, at some time or other, had XSS issues. We sympathise, especially if you're rolling a lot of stuff yourself. But for a 0.9.x level app to have as many as this crowd found - it just feels so fragile. Bear in mind that this community is full of people who do this stuff all the time, it's not like we'll be fooled with a switch 'n' bait like a magician might be able to pull for a non-technical audience. It's not even like Discourse sanitises non-valid HTML tags as we saw with the
<filename>.dmgstuff. (And why I had to inline that as code because having to type an entity is backwards. This is 2014, I should NOT have to be doing that kind of sanitisation on the client side.)And this is where I guess the issues converge. Change is one thing. I don't necessarily agree with Lorne about getting the forum as integrated as CS was - at least not initially. I understand the desire to be as 'unchangeful as possible', and when you're exchanging one tool for another tool (e.g. phpBB for MyBB or for SMF or for XenForo) there is going to be a learning curve.
The problem is there is so much stuff Discourse does that literally no other current forum software does, that even I have trouble figuring out what's going on. Bear in mind, I used to be on the SMF development team. I've also played with phpBB, MyBB, IPB, vBulletin, XenForo to varying degrees (including building plugins for things), and I can move between them - and also between specific modified versions of them - with relative ease.
Coming here is literally a new world. I'm forced to mentally curtail years and years of experience, of learned behaviour. I'm resistant to it like anyone would be, but Discourse is the only major software that does infiniscroll as a primary control vehicle, Markdown (with all kinds of exciting variations including having to escape my own entities) as a primary entry method.
I'm not averse to JS wizardry, written enough JS in my time. I am averse to it when it creates a buggy mess that's a ridiculous CPU hog. I am averse to it when it makes me operate in a way that no other site does. I don't know any of the other DC installations, this is my first and so far only DC habitat. And it operates so differently from every other site... even Facebook's infiniscroll works as I would expect! That's a condemnation I have never uttered before, that I actively feel Facebook - for all its failures in the UI department - does infiniscroll better than DC does. But I will admit that the usage pattern is deliberately and intentionally different; like other infiniscroll patterns it promotes newest first - something that DC doesn't, and necessarily shouldn't.
I don't see the problem as JS. I don't think the other folks do either. Trying to change the world more than one step at a time is a problem. Trying to change peoples' paradigms is always going to be problematic - and when you're the only one doing it, you're the outlier. You're in a position of being a pariah - in front of the worst possible audience for it, and we will call you out on it.
I am getting more used to Discourse. But it is significantly more effort to do any of the tasks I have been doing in every other forum software for years.
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When I first read this, I kept seeing...
@Lorne_Kates said:Fuck you forum users
... but really reading/thinking...
@Lorne_Kates said:
Fuck you.
-- Forum UsersThat's how I feel. It's widely accepted that CS has been a pile of shit since the day it was installed, and yet when I spend my time and my money to set-up what I felt was a better solution -- and simply post it as a "hey, I think it's ready, let's try it" -- you, and the other "big names" quit. Not right away, mind you, but after leaving 100's of vile-filled posts on a platform that, ironically, you claim is inadequate for exactly those purposes.
@Lorne_Kates said:
This isn't just "I feels"-- this is what the community, your community, the people who made your site famous over the course of a decade
Wrong. These are the forums. A small percentage of TDWTF readers (i.e. "my" community) read comments. An even smaller post comments. An even smaller number register an account. And then, the percentage of the percentage hang out in the forums. And to be honest, I get the feeling many forums users don't read the front-page anymore.
When I renamed the site, I got a lot of grief, sure, but "my" community didn't rage quit. They stuck with it for over a full year. I eventually came around, and we now have a funny story to tell.
My intention was not to gut the community, but if a side-by-side trial of some new software is the sort of thing that breaks it, then it must have been a pretty shitty community to begin with. Let it break. I want no part of such a community.
Fortunately, I think this community will survive and thrive after this trial... but it will change, if for no other reason than the fact that you're quitting. You and the others that have quit will be missed.
I hope we can still be friends IRL (since you're the only one I've ever talked to / hung out).
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WorseThanFailure was the real wtf.
Also, morbs and her 12k posts.
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Isn't it interesting what click counters can illustrate?
Filed under: you better make the first link in your post the most important one
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That's not what I'm seeing. (EDIT: You implemented fraud prevention measures, I'm almost impressed. I would not take it as support that people only read the first thing as a unilateral behaviour, more that most people here don't really want to digest too much smugness about how wrong and meaningless their lives are)
Oh, and if we're doing the e-peen thing, there is one forum I've clocked up nearly 60,000 posts on over the last 5 years, quantity really doesn't prove anything, though I have an interesting story to tell out of that, too.
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Then there's the XSS issues.
Being the one who fixed most of the XSS issues the community found I have a slightly different perspective of how this happened.
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This is the first time we have seen a highly active community that is actively trying to exploit the site. (This kind of testing is awesome and way more valuable than any automated tool)
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XSS protection in Discourse is truly complex, to say the least in Discourse. Some is done server side, some client side.
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Discourse is open source, less senior devs often commit changes and exploits can slit through our reviews.
Don't believe me about complexity, have a look at my latest commit: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/d65efe7304b7069502bb04ad0eaa5174466ec6e6
We create HTML diffs for the client on the server, this is the correct and efficient coarse of action, it allows us to leverage good libraries that are good at doing diff.
We correctly escaped the input sent into the diff library:
before_markdown = tokenize_line(CGI::escapeHTML(@before)) after_markdown = tokenize_line(CGI::escapeHTML(@after))We correctly tokenized the HTML.
before_html = tokenize_html_blocks(@before) after_html = tokenize_html_blocks(@after)This tokenized HTML was later parsed by the Nokogiri SAX parser. Nokogiri has an edge case, it unescapes entities:
Nokogiri leaving HTML entities untouched
I want Nokogiri to leave HTML entities untouched, but it seems to be converting the entities into the actual symbol. For example: Nokogiri::HTML.fragment('<p>&reg;</p>').to_s res...
This at the end of the process we were joining these unescaped entities.
Its not a newbie mistake, its a complicated chain of dependencies that lead to an edge case. Sure, we should have tested this from get go. Sure, its an embarrassing bug. But I would not go as far as to say its a trivial error that is easily avoided.
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Fair enough on the 'how' part, because I knew it wasn't as simple as it is in any other environment. Half the problem, though, is the overcomplexity of the design which is why you have the chains of complexity that you do.
I'm not denying that this community is going to find issues if there are issues to be found, because we're mostly all programmers and stuff and we battle test stuff as part of our daily grind.
But I'm not convinced it's just coding issues; I think there are very real and practical design issues at work. I cannot, for example, imagine any circumstance why I should have to manually work around escaping
<filename>a la<filename>.dmg. It's not valid HTML but yet I as the user am being expected to work around what feels like a design limitation in the application. But I am given to understand this is intentional behaviour? It's a breeding ground for XSS. I'm almost afraid to try some of the more esoteric examples from https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-site_Scripting_(XSS) and I've seen some interesting ones over the years that do strange things like munging null bytes into tags because some browsers will accept i_mg where _ is a 0x00 byte...
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XSS protection in Discourse is truly complex, to say the least in Discourse. Some is done server side, some client side.
I hope that client-side XSS protection is rendering side otherwise you've got another problem in there, even if we've not yet found out how to
have fun withdemonstrate it. For bug reporting purposes.
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Absolute vs. Relative times should be an admin level option
It could even be a user option with minimal code changes, assuming you're doing the sensible thing and delivering stuff over the wire as timestamps.
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assuming you're doing the sensible thing and delivering stuff over the wire as timestamps.
Yes, we are.
I hope that client-side XSS protection is rendering side otherwise you've got another problem in there
Yes it is, built into ember with a few exceptions, final rendering of markdown happens on the server so we have to trust what the server gives us.
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is the overcomplexity of the design which is why you have the chains of complexity that you do
Part of this is the richness of the features, does any existing forum software provide with a highlighted history diff?
Regarding
<filename>I think our markdown engine could possibly be amended to auto escape html entities, but there are other side effect that may ensue.
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Half the problem, though, is the overcomplexity of the design which is why you have the chains of complexity that you do.
There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.
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You mean she's not a tiny Asian person?
I know the forums took a nosedive when she showed up. The forums weren't a ghetto before 2008.
294 posts in 5 days. Quality. That's on pace with the median for teenagers.
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The part that really seems to throw it is usernames; @faoileag appears to be the Worst of the Worst for this, as it really throws the TTS engine, pushing it back into “spell it out” mode. (Some of the time. Not consistently.)
Can't say I blame the engine. I'm not even sure I know how to pronounce it...Filed under: speech is not the best method to pass around email addresses anyway
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And it operates so differently from every other site... even Facebook's infiniscroll works as I would expect!
I don't know how Facebook works (I don't use it), but I've seen infiniscroll on other sites, and it wasn't nowhere near as annoying as it's on Discourse (though Discourse is my first site with infiniscoll of content that has an end - everywhere else that had infiniscroll it was basically content that goes on [for all intents and purposes] forever).
I'm used to forums that have pages, and where I can rely on the scrollbar to know roughly where on page I am - it's much easier to process that I'm ⅔rds down the page 2 of 5, than that I'm on post 72 of 86. Discourse is the only forum where I find myself consistently being fooled by the scrollbar - "ok, I'm near the end, page down, fuck you, there's more!".
Also, the editor is atrocious - even CS wasn't that bad, despite requiring manual <br>'s (it didn't actively get in my way of editing).
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I get the feeling many forums users don't read the front-page anymore.
This could be due to the fact that Discourse is considered by some to be the biggest, most entertaining wtf published on TDWTF in quite some time.My intention was not to gut the community, but if a side-by-side trial of some new software is the sort of thing that breaks it, then it must have been a pretty shitty community to begin with. Let it break. I want no part of such a community.
Strong words. Especially since you call the entire community "shitty" and not just the dissenters who might eventually leave (or have already done so). But honest.TDWTF is your site. Loose some, gain some. Not exactly a charming mindset, though.
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Hi Alex.
I registered on DC because CS DOES NOT WORK in registration or password reset anymore - for years (emails never arrive). Short of writing you a snail mail letter, I had no option available to me to fix this. In the internet vacuum, no one hears your screams. I can post anonymously in articles there, but forget SidebarWTF or the others. "An even smaller post comments...," well, now you know why. I felt quite disconnected, and am sure I wasn't the only one.
FWIW, I don't hate DC. Almost anything's better than a forum you can't (re-)register or reset your credentials on. But I'm not crazy about it either.
Seems to me a number of your users here re:DC feel disconnected too. One thing I learned when doing sales (some horrid memories here, but I digress...) before going full-time into IT 20 years ago that was a very important lesson: Angry customers are angry because they feel an impending loss of some sort. They express their anger as a last-ditch attempt to save what they feel is slipping away from them. It provides the seller (or, in this case, the site owner) a chance to hear the grievances and an opportunity to do something about it.
Now there are two parts to this. 1) It's YOUR site. You get to do what you want with it. 2) Your customers, the commenters and readers, will respond to what you do with your site. That may include extremes from inviting others to check out your site, to going away from your site altogether and warning others about it.
You are getting responses. What you do with them will determine what happens to this site.
FWIW, I, for one, would be sad to see it shut down for lack of participation. I suspect most of your forum readers would agree with me on that point, if nothing else.
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I don't know how Facebook works (I don't use it), but I've seen infiniscroll on other sites, and it wasn't nowhere near as annoying as it's on Discourse
That might be due to the fact that Discourse unloads posts higher up in the stream as soons as they are far away enough from the current viewport. AFAIK, Discourse is the only software that does that.And that behaviour works fundamentally against how we have used web pages for the last two decades: reach bottom of page, use scrollbar to go back to top of page fast.
Discourse forces you to use the go up button. And it forces a lot of other ideas behind it onto you as well. As a lot of other people have already said: we come here for fun. Not for learning how to use a new software. That in my eyes is the best explanation for the strong reactions Discourse provokes.
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That might be due to the fact that Discourse unloads posts higher up in the stream as soons as they are far away enough from the current viewport. AFAIK, Discourse is the only software that does that.
I thought that was turned off for desktop users now (on the assumption that they've got the memory to handle large documents).
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fundamentally against how we have used web pages for the last two decades
Do you think web pages, and the devices one uses to access said web pages, have changed at all in the last two decades?we come here for fun. Not for learning how to use a new software
Learning new software is not fun?
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@faoileag said:
fundamentally against how we have used web pages for the last two decades
Do you think web pages, and the devices one uses to access said web pages, have changed at all in the last two decades?
Actually, no, they haven't. The basic webpage is still text formatted with html, and the basic browser is still a render-engine for said html-formatted text.That a browser is far more powerful than twenty years ago, that these days you can use Javascript to simulate a windows application, i.e. do away with that basic structure, is another story.
@faoileag said:
we come here for fun. Not for learning how to use a new software
Learning new software is not fun?
When I just want to accomplish a simple task like writing a post, no it isn't.Discourse is a means not an end in itself.
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That might be due to the fact that Discourse unloads posts higher up in the stream as soons as they are far away enough from the current viewport. AFAIK, Discourse is the only software that does that.
I know, and I commented on that elsewhere.@dkf said:
I thought that was turned off for desktop users now (on the assumption that they've got the memory to handle large documents).
Nope, I still see posts pop in if I drag the scrollbar around.Learning new software is not fun?
It's the opposite of fun.
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And that behaviour works fundamentally against how we have used web pages for the last two decades: reach bottom of page, use scrollbar to go back to top of page fast.
Discourse departs from the twitter design in that it allows you to enter a topic in the middle and then scroll up to load posts earlier in the stream. The cloaking mechanism means that the scrollbar is "stable" it only gets longer.
The issue is that the scrollbar is not an indicator of your position in the stream just your position in the posts that were loaded in the browser during this "page session"
The plan is to eventually have a custom scrollbar that would allow us to better indicate your position in the stream as opposed to a rather arbitrary concept (posts that were loaded into memory in this session)
unloading only unloads from the DOM and replaces with a cloak of the same height, the unloading does not destablise the scroll bar.
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unloading only unloads from the DOM and replaces with a cloak of the same height, the unloading does not destablise the scroll bar.
Ah, you might have misunderstood me here - I didn't mean I use the scrollbar as an indicator of anything. I meant using the scrollbar to go to post 1 from last post by grabbing the slider and moving it to the top stop. And unloading from the DOM prevents me from doing that.Edit: corrected some bad grammar. Still on my first coffee.
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Filed under: you better make the first link in your post the most important one
That was why I only clicked the last one.
Filed Under: Contrarian
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The cloaking mechanism means that the scrollbar is "stable" it only gets longer.
The scrollbar is anything but stable - when you navigate, it jumps around like mad when it's thumb gets near the edges.
