A few small design opinions

UX
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I’m testing the chat feature on another forum.

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  1. I find the action bar a little bit too invasive. Maybe I would get rid of 2 of the 3 most used reactions… :thinking::
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    Since the window is tiny, when reading you’re often hovering a message. If it never overlaps a message, I wonder if it could be improved.

  2. It covers the replied message excerpt:
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    I’m used to Discord in which we can click the full “quoted” message itself to go to it:
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    Here on the Discourse chat, you can only click the small arrow part, which I find not very intuitive (but again, I’m used to Discord…):
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  3. When you upload an image and set the chat in fullscreen, the thumbnail remains tiny. It would be nice if the thumbnail was larger when on fullscreen.
    Small chat window:
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    Fullscreen chat window:

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Pasting a small image upscales it, making it blurry. In my opinion, it shouldn’t upscale small images:

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Another thing: it also hides a bit of the top of the message text (if the message doesn’t reply to another one) when you hover the whole message:

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And for some reason, on slow connections (I suppose: I have a very slow connection nowadays), there is a delay to show the reaction bar. I don’t know why since there is apparently no server-side query. I didn’t find a delay in the CSS as well. It seems a bit sluggish:

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The delay is on purpose, to avoid things moving too much on the screen. Nothing related to internet speed.

Where would you put it then?

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I’m not sure.

Just to explain, I often keep the cursor on a paragraph I’m reading on the Internet (like people that put their finger on the text of a book they’re reading), hence the fact that the text is partially hidden bothers me a little. It’s not unreadable at all obviously, just a tiny thing that scratches my brain.

Maybe reduce the size a bit, because the reaction bar seems very long to me.
Here’s with a scale of 1 (default):
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And a scale of 0.85:
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A scale of 0.9 would also work… And here’s without the quick reactions, since most-used reactions are already available in the reaction emoji menu:
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Default reaction emoji menu:
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Maybe move the reactions to the "more" menu (but I'm not fond of it)

On top of other actions like when we right-click on a message on Discord? But I don’t think it’s particularly convenient if we remove the quick reactions.

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But there are also mobile interactions to take into account… :person_shrugging:

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Yes we might want to consider removing recent reactions, at least in drawer mode @mcwumbly

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I think some minor adjustments to size and positioning would help a fair bit.

We can make it a bit smaller and shift it up a bit to make sure it never occludes any text in the message and leaves a little breathing room in between.

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Not really because you have the case of multiple one line messages of the same user.

Also is being smaller a better idea than removing recent?

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I like the idea of removing recent in drawer mode, it’s a very easy incremental improvement

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What is “drawer mode” exactly?

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The floating chat container at bottom right of the page, as opposed to full page chat.

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I pushed various changes to msg actions, let me know how it goes for you :raised_hands:

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It’s just perfect for me. :clap:

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