Why hasn't this abomination died yet?

xaade

But not usually in a single exodus as happened when it sunk in that duckwhores was here to stay.

People leave in mass amounts because of change.
Sometimes that is justified by how bad the change is.
But pointing to people leaving because of a change to indicate that the change is bad, is a fallacy.

We of all people should be well aware of this effect.

That's why so many improvements in UI are turned down, simply because of "training costs" even if the new UI is so damn intuitive and that's the point.... nope, gotta train. Or UI is turned down simply because of moving cheese. Unfortunately people don't adjust to change as quickly as programmers do, and to be honest it isn't all that much quicker than most people. We complain about idiot users, then freak out if our favorite work environment changes too much.

As fast as technology should be, it's bogged down by people who don't like change.

HardwareGeek

@CarrieVS said:

I come from [another] forum where ... all as mad as a box of very large frogs that are off their medication

And we here are not?

CarrieVS

@HardwareGeek said:

And we here are not?

Yes, but somewhat smaller frogs who sometimes take their medication.

RaceProUK

@CarrieVS said:

Yes, but somewhat smaller frogs

And foxes and hedgehogs and cats and… ;)

CarrieVS

Foxes and hedgehogs and cats who are as mad as a box of somewhat large frogs who only sometimes take their medication.

Anyway the other forum has even more animals, a giant robot spider, a mirror demon, a Sith Lord who is also a T. rex, and whatever Marcuse is.

HardwareGeek

@boomzilla said:

what we need are more web pages that cram something into every single piece of screen real estate. I'm not sold on the "minimalize all the things" stuff that went on recently at meta.d, but I definitely don't have the white space phobia that I've heard a lot of people talk about.

Good use of white space is an important part of visual design. Wall of content is not good, but neither is excessive white space. Discourse is a little too minimalist, IMHO, but it's not terrible, at least at the window size I generally use. If I maximize the window, though, it's awful (again, IMHO).

HardwareGeek

@sloosecannon said:

responsiveness is good (if we're not trying to import 10,000 posts or something)

Responsiveness is generally ok most of the time, but there a lot of things besides the import that make it unresponsive.

HardwareGeek

@xaade said:

people don't adjust to change as quickly as programmers do

Implying that programmers aren't people. :)

anonymous234

It's a good idea with many WTFs in its implementation.

Good things: live updating, notifications, easy file upload, automatic draft saving, likes, plugin support, other fancy stuff I can't think of right now.
Bad things, in approximate order of increasing badness:
The infiniscroll. It's not the end of the world, but it definitely creates more trouble than it solves.
The Discosearch, which still mostly sucks.
The overly complicated platform and code base that requires you to install a VM to run the server (it "keeps noob developers away from the code", actual statement by the discodevs)
The excessively slow Javascript code that it needs to run to display a page (meaning it can be SLOOOW on phones, which combined with the infiniscroll means scrolling can be unpredictable and you end up at the top of the thread when you wanted to read the next post)
The refusal by the developers to include proper quoting, because of some weird beliefs that it's a bad thing somehow
The complete lack of testing by the developers, resulting in the many minor and major bugs that regularly pop up even when we're not trying to break the site
The completely idiotic syntax that's some kind of Frankenstein monster made of Markdown, BBCode and HTML, meaning it never ever does what you'd expect it to.

RaceProUK

@anonymous234 said:

The complete lack of testing by the developers

I'd argue against that, but… I really can't; after all, I made a three-line patch that didn't work. I fixed it, but I really shouldn't have sent it in the first place. Not when it was obviously broken, anyway.

xaade

@HardwareGeek said:

Implying that programmers aren't people. :)

Well, the matrix is still a possibility.

Report all sensations of deja-vu.

tar

@boomzilla said:

The markdown / etc stuff is easily the worst part of discourse for me. I mean, I don't really have a huge problem with markdown, but the implementation that is used here is so inconsistent that it's really problematic.

I would be perfectly happy with a 'disable Markdown' user option (and maybe a 'disable BBCode' option as well, although then I wouldn't be able to use [quote] functionality...)

sloosecannon

@anonymous234 said:

The completely idiotic syntax that's some kind of Frankenstein monster made of Markdown, BBCode and HTML, meaning it never ever does what you'd expect it to.

Can we make a plugin that forces a single language and makes you stick with it? I feel like that would be the best improvement possible...

(Probably BBCode, because it's functional without the messyness/exploitability of HTML)

tar

@delfinom said:

No such thing as saner Markdown

Markdown has some minor utility when posting from a phone (although less for me personally now I can type <> again on my phone keyboard), but it kind of is just the worst thing ever as a formatting engine. I don't understand why people are so fascinated with it.

blakeyrat

@tar said:

I don't understand why people are so fascinated with it.

Just people who hate usability and hate their own users. Stuff like GitHub, Atwood, StackOverflow, etc.

sloosecannon

@tar said:

it kind of is just the worst thing ever as a formatting engine.

I'm not sure I'd personally go that far, but for forum usage it's pretty terribad. There are much better things you could use (BBCode, namely...)

Yamikuronue

I really like that you can type '---' and get a line.

I hate that it makes headings half the time, but it's nice to be able to get a quick and dirty horizontal rule.

# isn't terrible either.

tar

@Yamikuronue said:

# isn't terrible either.

is probably my least favourite 'feature' of Markdown `:(`

HardwareGeek

@tar said:

it kind of is just the worst thing ever as a formatting engine

I think it's ok for its original, very limited purpose — very simple text formatting that is also readable as plain text, using the same sort of *, /, and _ you used to do to add emphasis in plain-text messages. It's good at that, although Discourse's discoursistent escaping of those characters is a problem.

In a web forum where every user will see the formatted text, and the plain-text doesn't need to be easily readable, it doesn't make much sense. Mixing it with other markup in a forum that supports more powerful markup, and parsing it all badly with REs — well, we all know what that leads to.

tarunik

@tar said:

I don't understand why people are so fascinated with it.

Especially when reStructuredText provides 99% of the advantages of Markdown in a head-to-head technical comparison while being fully specified...

tar

@tarunik said:

reStructuredText provides 99% of the advantages of Markdown

Hmm. I may go off and investigate that...

aliceif

@Yamikuronue said:

# isn't terrible either.

@tar said:

is probably my least favourite 'feature' of Markdown :(

Compromise solution: Only use the long Markdown form:

#heading1#

##heading2##

######blah#######

#heading1#

##heading2##

######blah#######

hungrier

@tarunik said:

reStructuredText

[quote=the primer on the page] 3. with a sub-list starting at a different number
4. make sure the numbers are in the correct sequence though!
[/quote]
Discourse, of course, doesn't like how sensible this is.

Yamikuronue

@aliceif said:

Only use the long Markdown form:

100% acceptable. Better, in fact, than what we have now.

CarrieVS

@Yamikuronue said:

I really like that you can type '---' and get ... a quick and dirty horizontal rule.

I tend to use
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
for a quick and dirty horizontal rule even if I'm not in Markdown country.

RaceProUK

Some BBCode-based forums allow the use of [hr]

[hr]

Which, of course, doesn't work here

CarrieVS

@RaceProUK said:

Some BBCode-based forums allow the use of [hr]

[hr]

In my experience you have to do
[hr]-[/hr]
(the character in the tags can be anything, but has to be something), but that still doesn't work here.

RaceProUK

@CarrieVS said:

In my experience you have to do[hr]-[/hr]

Well, at least the raw HTML tag works here:

CarrieVS

@RaceProUK said:

It's not the most y BBtag on TCS, but the only ones to beat it are a couple of Avi's custom ones. The very existence of [sarcasm] is a in my opinion (and Avi's, actually, but it was asked for and he made it more or less to see if he could) and the custom spoiler tag where you can specify what it says instead of 'spoiler' before you show it.

The latter in itself is great, but he was determined to make it nestable but found out you just can't do that with BBcode, so rather than give up he resorted to a rather awkward hack.

aliceif

Some SMF-based forum I rarely post on uses just [hr].

CarrieVS

That seems more sensible. I shall have to ask Avi about it.

Captain

I think you mean 66 characters, almost exactly. And that's with serifs. It's shorter without.

loopback0

@JazzyJosh said:

The five tons of wasted space on the sides is a problem. Honestly, you could probably fit two threads in the same space.

The widescreen CSS fixes that.

Probably Hanzo, replying late.

HardwareGeek

@Captain said:

And that's with serifs. It's shorter without.

I don't understand the obsession for sans-serif typefaces. They're cleaner. They're more modern. They're more readable. No, they're not; at least they're not more readable. The serifs provide more variety to the letter forms, and the eye/brain more easily distinguishes between similar letters. In a well-designed serif typeface, I, l and 1 are unambiguous. (In most computer typefaces, even sans-serif ones, the 1 is unambiguous, but guess why: IT HAS A SERIF ADDED. Yes, the type designers added a serif to a sans-serif font for readability.)

One of these is a valid word. One is a valid Roman numeral. The other three are gibberish, or at least not English words. Assuming your browser is using a sans-serif font, tell me which is which without looking at the raw¹. You may be able to see that they are very slightly different, but not which is which:

Ill

lIl
llI
III
lll

[spoiler]1: iLL 2: LiL 3: LLi 4: iii 5: LLL[/spoiler]

¹ Or looking at the source, or the spoiler, or changing your browser's font, or quoting the text and seeing which ones fail the speelchucker. Did I miss any, smartasses?

aliceif

Set your browser's sans-serif font to be a serif font. Easy as that.

Yamikuronue

Ouch:

RaceProUK

~~BITCH~~COMPLAIN, please:

Masaaki_Hosoi

My two cents: I would personally not be at all opposed to XenForo-powered DailyWTF forums. XenForo's pretty damn good forum software.
Particularly, the formatting is very predictable and does what you'd expect (and doesn't blow up when quoted)
What a concept!

Captain

Should I just write some forum software? The Haskell development cycle would let me do something workable really quick.

tar

I'd certanly be interested to look at the code if you did do that... :D

Onyx

@delfinom said:

No such thing as saner Markdown

Dunno, I actually wrote stuff on reddit now and I find it's implementation a bit better. Sure, it doesn't allow for HTML / BBCode, but the Markdown bit seems a bit better. It even has tables!