Might just be a personal preference issue for me, but Infini-scroll is horrible. I really wish the responses in topics were paged… just like every other forum software I’ve used. We’re not scrolling a picture list to read the funnies so scrolling content infinitely doesn’t make sense. Infini-scroll also breaks the Link header at the top of the page. I like the small control at the bottom that allows you to jump to posts or top/bottom, that’s nifty. But the fact that responses aren’t paged well bothers me. I want to be able to easily scroll through pages, hit a bottom of the page, etc.
Forum Topics must be 15 characters, I couldn’t post this topic without adding the extra ‘/Topic’. This was incredibly annoying to try and get around. I shouldn’t need 15 characters.
Imposing long topics is made so that people go through the effort of composing meaningful titles. For the sake of other readers. Some people don’t have time to read everything, or use searches. Something like “issues” or “help me” is terribly uninformative as to the content of the post.
As for infini-scroll, I suspect it only takes some getting used to. It doesn’t strike me as particularly worse than arbitrary paging (unless you want to print pages on paper, of course).
I definitly needed several weeks before being comfortable with infini scroll, but now i rarly notice it.
I would however like if the forum would continue your scrolling where you left it if I revisit a topic.
For the character limit, it seemed like a good idea at first to get spammers away…but actually it keeps getting in the way at some point, I guess we should remove it.
Do you click on the forum topic title or do you click on the little circles or do you click on the time of the most recent post? (I almost always do the last one as the circles don’t appear unless I’ve responded, I guess.)
[quote=“sleaker, post:1, topic:32376”]
Might just be a personal preference issue for me, but Infini-scroll is horrible.
[/quote]Well you’re not alone, but you’re not a strong majority either. Infinite scrolling in itself is not horribe. Infinite scrolling done wrong and in the wrong place is horrible, but imo Discourse does infinite scrolling right.
[quote=“sleaker, post:1, topic:32376”]
Infini-scroll also breaks the Link header at the top of the page.
[/quote]I don’t understand what you’re referring to. Please elaborate
[quote=“sleaker, post:1, topic:32376”]
I want to be able to easily scroll through pages, hit a bottom of the page, etc.
[/quote]All I’m hearing is “I want things to be like they used to be”. You’re not saying why paged topics are better. Let me tell you why I think infinite scrolling is better:
Forum discussions are not split into neat boxes of 15 replies each. It’s an interconnected stream of discussion. Also a good forum is highly self-referential, and will constantly remind you that “Y is being said because X was said earlier”. With the discussion in its entirety readily available to me, there’s less rehashing and duplication of content.
Infinite scrolling encourages reading, which is perfectly in line with Discourse’s mission. On other forums I’ve frequently seen “thread was too long so I didn’t read the whole thing but here’s my opinion anyway hurr durr”. I’ve hardly ever seen that on discourse forums, because it makes skim-reading very efficient, so jumping to the end becomes less appealing.
If you’ve read 30/32 posts in a thread, it’s safe to assume you’ll want to read the remaining two. I’d much rather have those posts immediately loaded for me than click a “next” button and wait a couple seconds for the next page to load.
Pages weren’t designed for usability in the first place. It’s a limitation we invented because we hadn’t come up with a better way to present content without overloading the server/client. Thankfully, we’ve since moved on.
So I ask you: How exactly is Discourse’s infinite scrolling making your browsing experience more difficult?
And how would paged topics have made it easier?
[quote=“sleaker, post:1, topic:32376”]
Forum Topics must be 15 characters, I couldn’t post this topic without adding the extra ‘/Topic’. This was incredibly annoying to try and get around. I shouldn’t need 15 characters.
[/quote]That’s blowing things WAY out of proportion. It can’t have possibly been that hard to get around…
[quote=“nehon, post:4, topic:32376”]
For the character limit, it seemed like a good idea at first to get spammers away…but actually it keeps getting in the way at some point, I guess we should remove it.
[/quote]I really don’t mind the topic character limit. It encourages people to write intuitive and easily searchable titles instead of “Help!”. Though I agree it just gets in the way on rare occasions. Perhaps it would best utilised for reminding, like when you triple-post, instead of completely restricting.
It should do that. Does it not do that for you? Discourse tracks your read-state (the blue dot that disappears as you read the posts in a new topic). It also tracks your post-position in the address bar. Scroll from top to bottom in any thread and watch it change.
Alright so lets start in. on some more Infini-scroll issues.
Can’t view the site footer without scrolling to the bottom, which I’m expecting to be able to do quickly. But this isn’t the case when I get into a 400+ reply topic. Thus I can’t actually flag, share, or bookmark till I’ve scrolled to the bottom. The blue eye is not intuitive. I didn’t notice it until you actually mentioned it. But even then since the blue eye is based on where I’ve scrolled if I move beyond where I’ve actually read it’s lost it’s meaning. Scrolling and reading aren’t inherently linked. only loosely so.
I also can’t change the watched status on a page without scrolling to the bottom.
Scrolling needs to have one function, not multiple interconnected but different functions. If we want infini-scroll I feel the bottom option bars should be moved to a side area or held in place. The Blue Icon should be more prominent on the post and actually be more indicative of what it means. It also doesn’t update to my own reply once I’ve replied to a topic indicating that I havne’t actually read my own topic? that’s odd. It makes me think it’s not working properly.
Character limits don’t actually encourage intuitive topics, they encourage slightly longer words and are overall a user annoyance. Point: my topic.
[quote=“sleaker, post:9, topic:32376”]
Can’t view the site footer without scrolling to the bottom, which I’m expecting to be able to do quickly. But this isn’t the case when I get into a 400+ reply topic. Thus I can’t actually flag, share, or bookmark till I’ve scrolled to the bottom.
[/quote]Yes you can.
[quote=“sleaker, post:9, topic:32376”]
But even then since the blue eye is based on where I’ve scrolled if I move beyond where I’ve actually read it’s lost it’s meaning. Scrolling and reading aren’t inherently linked. only loosely so.
[/quote]I’m not saying Discourse magically reads your mind. It just gets you close enough to do the rest yourself. You don’t need a physical bookmark in a book to tell you which paragraph you left off on either.
[quote=“sleaker, post:9, topic:32376”]
I also can’t change the watched status on a page without scrolling to the bottom.
[/quote]This one I agree with. I’d like this to change as well. Changing tracking status should be available from anywhere.
[quote=“sleaker, post:9, topic:32376”]
Character limits don’t actually encourage intuitive topics, they encourage slightly longer words and are overall a user annoyance. Point: my topic.
[/quote]You’re not proving a point simply by disregarding good practice. The vast majority of users on our forum are perfectly capable of crafting descriptive titles that accurately summarise their topic.
Actually, the “read state” is my second biggest pet peeve for the new site because your description seems to only work for brand new threads or threads that I’ve posted in… ie: 15% of the forum reading that I do. It would be really nice if I could actually see what threads I’m up to date on and which ones I’m not but the link highlight has nothing to do with what I’ve read… only what I’ve clicked on.
This forum is head-and-shoulders above the old one so I just deal with it.
My biggest pet peeve is the lack of easily accessed quick help and the fact that the docs menu disappears when I’m scrolled down to where I’d actually want to use it.
That’s because we’re on a migrated forum. All of the old posts are considered unread.
[quote=“pspeed, post:11, topic:32376”]
My biggest pet peeve is the lack of easily accessed quick help and the fact that the docs menu disappears when I’m scrolled down to where I’d actually want to use it.
[/quote]It was my understanding that Discourse would be getting a “sticky sidebar” in v1.3, but it seems that fell off the roadmap, so we might want to explore other alternatives to a more accessible Quick Help. Maybe we can add it to the “Hamburger menu”.
As for the disappearing top-nav bar, we simply disagree on that one
Okay so lets say I’ve scrolled halfway through the replies on a topic, I decide I want to bookmark or share the original post. I have to scroll to the top now and use that functionality, then scroll back to where I was at previously. Paging just provides better usability here as it lets me stay on the current post and open a new window at the top. Discourse doesn’t have proper per-post headers that I can easily click on to open a new browser window to do this. The share buttons aren’t actual html links they are javascript objects, which again, reduces usability. The Green jump-to-post element is also javascript, so no way to interact with it by opening new pages.
I prefer paged topics because they provide simple methods of interaction. Each page I can open in a new tab, link to easily, copy the address of or manipulate in normal web-expected ways (right click links). All of this functionality is removed with infini-scroll. Paged displays also provide me a way to mentally browse back for past responses. Bookmarks are not something I’m used to using so maybe I should try them out. But when I’m viewing a topic it’s nice to have the extra subdivision, as I’m reading through I can remember where certain posts were, easily click back on a relatively close page and find an old post. I find browsing like this nearly impossible due to not having proper html elements displayed/clickable in the current forum.
EDIT: So I missed the read state thing, apparently I thought it was Empire’s user graphic, but now I have no clue what the read state is or where it’s located, unless we’re talking about the topic progress thing in the bottom right, or possibly the blue flash when I re-open a previous topic. If this is the case, the blue-flash doesn’t track progress, it tracks the last point you’ve jumped to which resets if you use the goto green bar.
The attempt to keep the URL in the address bar at the current post that you’re viewing is a nice attempt to resolve a problem with infini-scroll pages, but it isn’t accurate enough and doesn’t update quickly enough to be usable. I actually find it to be more of a negative than a positive. Discourse really needs some form of per-post link directly displayed that doesn’t require javascript.
Then I can’t see what use it is to have it really. If I’m 30 posts down trying to answer some question, I can either scroll back up 30 posts to find the hiding menu… or I can simply open my book marks.
So if it’s not available when reading posts then let’s just remove it.
How would paging possibly be any better in this scenario?
[quote=“sleaker, post:13, topic:32376”]
Paging just provides better usability here as it lets me stay on the current post and open a new window at the top. Discourse doesn’t have proper per-post headers that I can easily click on to open a new browser window to do this.
[/quote]If you wanna open the main topic in a new window, right click the sticky header title. If you wanna open a specific post, right click the top-right timestamp of the post you want.
Apparently, having that disappear in all but the place you find it least useful was a design decision.
To me, the ONLY place the wiki and javadoc links are useful is when reading a post. So why make them disappear when reading posts. I mean sure, leave them on the main page or whatever… but why have them in the post threads if you can’t even use them. It’s totally silly.
Exactly. I was talking about this workflow:
You write a post, but need to check a wiki article. Click on jmonkey head takes you to the main page where the link are displayed. Then you right click on Wiki-> open link on new tab. Then press back on browser to go back on the thread (the last step is optional, since you can still write your post from the main page; but of course you can’t read other post of the thread).
I think it was the lesser evil. At first there was no link at all, and there should be some hurdles in making it available everywhere.
According to @Erlend this was a design decision to have it disappear. I can’t think of a single reason why that would be desired… certainly not by the people who actually use it.
Well to be fair, that’s the recommended way to do it in discourse, and you can do it in about 5 minutes. You don’t have access to everything, only subparts of the page to put your custom stuff. I tried to do it differently, but other issues arise, like the menu was hidden by the post title, or by the menu icons, or below the header so you could never see it, and so on… I spend 1 hour on it, and Erlend said “don’t bother too much, let’s just make the default thing for now”. So we did.
