Discourse first impressions (spoiler alert: it's amazing)

praise
1

Let’s start with the good stuff, or as I like to call it:

HOLYSHITYES:

  • Incoming/outgoing links
  • Just likes, no rating
  • Beautiful, so beautiful
  • Expandable & traceable quotes (you know what the best part is? 20
    minutes in with Discourse, and I straight up just assumed that this
    was in fact implemented when I saw a partial quote that got me
    wondering what the full post was).
  • Mentions (by far the most useful feature of my current forum)
  • WordPress integration
  • Markdown
  • Tons of other stuff that I forget because it just works.

Awkward Stuff

list formatting doesn’t work very well atm.

“Like” heart button disappears instead of highlighting. If you must have two elements for the same function I’d prefer the two-way interaction between the ‘Last read post-flag’ and ‘Bookmark-button’ - where by clicking on either one of them, the other will mimic the action.

I don’t understand what this is:
There are 0 unread and 15 new topics remaining, or view latest topics
0 unread topics out of what? 15 new topics, uh, since I started reading this topic? since I came online?

All profiles appear to say this:
Created At: —

Is that a bug or intentional?

I had a draft lying around for a while and in a completely unrelated thread I clicked “Reply as new topic”. At first there was no notice, it just showed my old draft. I clicked again and this time it game me the “Are you sure you want to abandon your post?” notice and I opted yes, but still the old draft was there. This was repeated once more, but on the 4th try it updated my reply properly with the thread I was replying to. I’ll submit a bug report if I can figure out a consistent way to reproduce it.

I love the “Show best posts” button, but I would have liked a small ‘?’ button that I could click on to see what this actually entails. How are the best posts picked? (I eventually learned how by reading posts, but that’s not the way it should be).

Also, “Show best posts” is disrupted by using the “1/11” post counter. If you click on it to bring you to the bottom it’ll suddenly revert to the default view as it does it.

“Reply as new topic” should grab the category from the topic you’re replying to, since it’ll most likely be the same.

Thank you for what is undoubtedly a revolutionary piece of software. For better and for worse, you ain’t seen the last of me.

15 Likes
2

Can you elaborate on this, I must have missed this feature…

1 Like
3

See this:
http://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-and-wordpress-integration/531/?u=erlend_sh
And this:
http://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-and-wordpress-integration/531/41?u=erlend_sh

them embeds… man I love Discourse.

1 Like
4

Hmm if so that is a bug @eviltrout and we should fix.

Agreed I am not sure why we don’t do that already.

5

Me to, I am also interested to know.

6

I gave him the links he needed above.

1 Like
7

True, it disrupts flow somehow and you could more easily see if you liked a post or not because it does not require reading text.

Furthermore, “Undo like” does not update the like avatar list. After liking and unliking a post 3 times I now see my avatar 3 times as “liker”.

729×122 5.91 KB

Another thing regarding post controls (or how you call them):

LTPwwta.png733×253 9 KB

The icons are somewhat okay to read but it is incredibly hard to see if there are replies to this post because the contrast is just so low. A slight CSS adjustment would be nice here.

1 Like
8

You might wanna make a dedicated bug post for that Likes bug, but nice catch!

I’m guessing their line of thinking was that most people won’t actually be that interested in who responded specifically to what post, they just wanna keep scrolling and read the entire conversation. The “(n) Replies” button is for those who become especially interested in one post in particular, and so they can easily mouse over the bottom part and see if there’s a larger discussion about it.

9

Well, considering that this is already discussed in this thread and the like logic would require a revision anyway (if this feature is implemented) I though I could as well just mention it here.

Yeah, I think so too. And I definitely like that these kind of things are faded when not hovered. However, what I was referring to is mainly that without hovering over a post I can’t see if there even are replies to this post.

10

There is already a topic on that plus several duplicates, so no thanks. I’m personally not a fan of “don’t do that” bugs for rare, obscure actions that aren’t sensible to take anyway.

11

You should try viewing this topic on a tablet and see what happens.

12

I don’t own a tablet so I can’t. I also don’t have an addon here that lets me modify my User Agent (and I don’t know what to set it to). I could google on that or you could just tell me what’s different. :wink:

Edit: Did in nonetheless in Chrome but it didn’t seem to have any effect.
Tried Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10 and Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Nexus 7 Build/JRO03D) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19 (confirmed with http://show-ip.net/browserinfo/) but the site showed up exactly like it did with a normal UA.

13

Waiting to implement this as soon as they allow me to add it through the Wordpress Dashboard. Until then, it’s essentially a non-feature.

14

fixed this yesterday

1 Like
15

Cheers!

Also this.

16

Seems there’s still a small oddity about it. I think it displays time the same way it’s displayed in posts, which turns out a bit weird there because you preface it with “Created at”, and in my case because my account is still very new it says “Created at: 3 days”. I think this section should show dd/mm/yyy, always.

17

looks like collateral damage from the war against ago

http://meta.discourse.org/t/relative-time-something-was-posted/7175

18

That is now fixed, definitely annoying.

1 Like
19

Don’t want to create a new topic on that… but I have a strong need to tell the people behind Discourse that your forum software is an amazing piece of work! It became my favorite forum solution within around 1 month. I understand fully what has motivated you to re-think the way a forum can work and you have found a nice approach to solve some of the annoying things.

So… thanks for your work.

6 Likes
20

Well like I always say, if we can please voxel pirates, we can please anybody! :wink:

3 Likes