I cannot figure out 2 things:
Have anyone else experienced this issue?
It’s possible but we’ve got a special case that makes it more complicated than a simple drop-in. The category selector only allows existing categories to be added… but we currently allow a custom @ entry to be added to apply the component to the top-level “all categories” view.
We’ll have to split that into a separate setting and migrate the existing settings to be able to use the category dropdown.
This tab?
I can’t reproduce the issue, it may have been fixed already — if you still encounter this let us know.
Sorry, I have since left Discourse and moved my community back to Discord.
This is incredibly confusing. Could you explain what the “@” means and how to use it? I have seen it in the Kanban Settings UI and could not figure out what it does.
Also, why is having a custom “@” makes it impossible to use the dropdown? Just add the “@” entry to the dropdown, wouldn’t that work? And even better, why name it the “@”? Say “All Categories” in that dropdown, and make it use the “@” behind the scenes. It turned out to be too cryptic even for me, a software developer, who’s been also using Discourse from its inception.
This is off topic obviously, but I would like to add my two cents and say that the lasting frustrations with the Discourse UI makes me completely unsuccessful in recruiting my partners and project stakeholders to use Discourse. They all hate the UI, they just can’t use it because it’s confusing by all means, and this inability to set Kanban to be a useful tool only adds to the frustration of those partners who I’m trying to convince to get on board with using Discourse for project management. To get back to the actual issue discussed in this topic, how on earth should I explain the “@” to a manager who just wants to open the settings panel and configure the kanban lists to their likings? It is all these small things that add up and make people completely disoriented as they enter the Discourse space, and they try to leave immediately and ask me not to engage with them within this platform anymore as it wastes their time. I’m helpless in making people excited about Discourse. And to make it worse, for some reason the Discourse team worsens some aspects of the UI instead of improving it, see a recent update here and my critique of it: Now that the topic title is editable by click, I can't simply copy it without entering the edit mode
Btw, if I enter in there @MyCategory (which I did intuitively while trying to understand what the @ does), it does not tell me any validation errors. How is it considered okay to not tell me I’m doing something incorrectly when it is obvious from the programmer prospective, and it can be easily detected when “Saving…” the updated setting value.
Sorry I had to say it all especially after I saw that someone left Discourse and moved back to Discord, which only confirmed by concerns and frustrations with the UI.
I was really trying hard, but there’s just too much complexity. It’s like in the old days - Android vs iPhone wars.
Android would let you customize whatever you wanted.
iPhone was super limited, but… just worked.
This is the same case with Discourse right now. I believe we need to take more of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry road: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
There’s so much confusion (like DMs vs Private chats, to name the first one that pops up) that it’s really hard to convince people to use it freely. On Discord, there’s less friction. Same with Skool. I think this is what we should be aiming for, not adding more features.
I recently had a client leave Discourse for exactly the reason you state - over complexity.
But tbh, looking at some Discord servers, I wouldn’t say they were at all simple? There’s a lot you can add to a Discord server now (including bots).
One huge downside of moving to Discord or any bespoke walled app is that you lose SEO, no? Perhaps that doesn’t impact you.
Whoever implemented it chose @ as a unique symbol to represent the top-level topic lists when not filtered to a category or tag. This is like forum.example.com/latest or forum.example.com/top. So you enter @ separately as its own entry to apply the board there.
I agree that this is confusing, but it’s something that can be ignored unless you want global kanban boards.
It doesn’t, it just complicates moving to the category dropdown because we have to also create a migration so we’re not reverting settings on sites that are already using it this way.
Theme settings are dictated by core APIs, so when we use the category list type, we can not extend it with additional options from the theme itself.
Discourse isn’t a massive company, we’re time constrained to focus on the most used features and refactoring components (which are offered at 0 cost btw) can be difficult to prioritize. If someone wants to sponsor kanban setting improvements we can certainly make it a higher priority.
Does Discord have a kanban board feature available? I looked but I wasn’t able to find much aside from a bot that integrates with an external kanban service.
You lose some control too, your users are Discord users, the content they post is also Discord’s content. When someone pays for Discord, the profit is Discord’s. There are trade-offs and costs for every platform.
Yeah, it’s unclear when we’ll be in a position to invest attention into the Kanban feature at this time.
It is something I’d like to revisit at some point. I think the adoption of the theme component has provided some evidence that there is a desire for more of this sort of thing out there.
Implementing it at as a theme component has had upsides – it’s relatively easy for any admin to find and install it – but it also comes with some significant constraints that make it difficult to design it the way one might expect.
If and when we do revisit it, I think there are two possible paths we go down – we could use the desired feature set for a Kanban board as a reason to improve the APIs available for theme components, or we could turn it into a core feature or plugin and have more access to add fit for purpose server APIs we need.
Until then, I think it’s likely to only get tweaks for specific issues.
That’s true, but that burden is on us - owners - not users. Users see it in the simplest way ever:
choose channel → send the message and that’s it!
There is no Kanban. There’s no need to comprehend the difference between Watching and Tracking. There’s no whole bunch of hey-how-cool-it-would-be-if-discourse-could-ALSO-do-xyz features.
All these features are super cool, for us - technical people/owners/admins.
But for regular folks - they want sense of community. They want to feel like they are free to express themselves and not having to figure out all those hundreds (i believe there are so many) different options, terms, and other stuff.
This is exactly the feedback I have from the stakeholders. They get lost in chats vs private topics.
In my current project, the project owner explores basecamp because he says he can’t just use Discourse after trying it. I’m advocating for Discourse because I know its outstanding features and capabilities, but I can’t do much because poor usability and a mess in both ui and terminology always outweighs the functionality. Not to say they Markdown that every normal non-technical person hates and I can’t explain to them why it is not wysiwyg in the first place. Thanks god the Discourse team is finally working on the proper editor. Most of people want a simple word-like text editor with just a few capabilities: formatting, tables, colors, images, code snippets. There is no reason why any of it should be obtained in the form of markdown from a regular user. More sophisticated features like AI seem useless when the end user can’t figure out why his post text editor is split in two columns vertically — that what they think about, not AI.
They have all the data. That’s the deal, and I understand the initial frustration, but I see a lot of improvements over the last months on Discourse.
Admins can choose to stop using chats and/or private messages and simplify. It takes time, and there is a learning curve everyone surely understand. Pros and cons like on everything.
I wish the best to the team, and I think we really need to contribute and give time to the natural evolution process.
This is ok behaviour in the short term, but it’s not a very good dynamic for organising information?
Users shooting from the hip <> a well organised website.
Hence Discourse focus on moderation and tools to organise things?
This is the exact case where we’re not keeping up with the with the changing landscape of how the members of our communities are consuming content.
I faced the exact same decision. Have something robust, well organized, with great SEO, something that will allow us to create a legacy due to the nature of the content we’re creating.
But people today (and this is obviously a generalization) do not feel like e.g. Slack is taking something away by limiting the history to the last 90 days.
One of my members told me (and she’s an extremely successful entrepreneur just hitting her 30s) that today, if the information is older that 3 months she’s not reading it, as everything changes so fast, digging up old stuff is just a waste of time. Regardless whether it’s business, science or… well, life.
And of course, having threads like we do here regarding a plugins that may get updated many months in the future - it is the valid case. but other than that - in the sense of “building the community” it’s more about the “feeling of belonging” and being able to interact with this community with little-to-none friction, instead of figuring out all the options that overwhelm us.
I talked bout it in previous threads, where I was asking about Skool success, as compared to Discourse.
I get this completely, thanks for your insight.
To be perfectly clear - I see amazing potential in Discourse, and if I could ever serve to help the team with my experience in community building - i’m happy to help.
