I see the “x days later” separator has been tightened up a bit, and I like it. I’m still annoyed by the double hr separator though:
I suggest removing the lower hr, and centering the “x months later” text to break it out of the regular posts grid.
6 Likes
Not a fan of the centering, but I agree on the line.
(edit: on mobile the centering isn’t too bad, but I think aligning with the creator is much better for desktop / tablet)
Unfortunately removing it is harder than it looks, because that indicator is not setting the bottom border; somehow the post below would need to know the separator above itself should be (conditionally!) disabled.
It would be easier if each post was setting the border below itself, but that’s a big change, not the way it works now – right now each post sets a border above itself.
It is also a bit weird since the border is set on two cells rather than on the parent div…
Anyway there is a sensible change to be made here, have each post set its border below (with the exception of last post, so that becomes a problem too), but I suspect it might be a difficult change. If anyone from the community wants to take a look, feel free.
I believe the “adjacent sibling selector” is what you are after here.
Something like this:
.time-gap + .topic-post .topic-body,
.time-gap + .topic-post .topic-avatar {
border-top: none;
}
9 Likes
Oh awesome that seems to work; let me give it a try. Cheers @DeanMarkTaylor 
5 Likes
Going to add my two cents here: I don’t like the new design. Not sure if it is the missing bottom line, or the lack of the clock, but it seems to blend in too much for me. I like the double line and clock icon because it was very visual, and easy to see that time had elapsed. Now it is harder to see quickly…
3 Likes
I agree, not a fan of this change, the double line was signifying a break in continuity, it was far more visually obvious. The way it looks now to me is a bit of a visual bug…
Either:
or
Work better for me, cause at least that word is not floating in an unclear space.
8 Likes
The last one looks really good! I’m all for that one. Actually both work; the first one just looked weird at first because of the cropping.
p.s. the centering was really important because it breaks with the left-align and communicates to a scanning eye that a change happened. My design doesn’t work without it. I like Sam’s iteration more though.
I darkened the text a bit that make the “omit line only” work a bit better.
Placing on the line gives us some extra vertical space, but this iteration at least looks right (imo)
3 Likes
Actually centering is quite wrong in this case, since the metadata is functionally attached to the next post in the sequence, e.g.
two weeks later, Erlend said…
Not
two weeks later
Erlend said…
- Proper alignment keeps the time statement connected to the next post, which is absolutely correct – there literally is no time gap until someone posts again, until that happens the topic just ended six months ago. We avoid creating a giant whitespace pause.
- When random text is centered, versus aligned, it breaks the reading flow of the topic. That is rather criminal on a system designed to encourage reading. What else do we center? Nothing. Why does this need to be centered? It doesn’t.
- If there is flow change, it should be down vertically, like water flows, like gravity flows, like reading naturally pulling you downdowndown … not jerking you over horizontally.
Centering is defensible on mobile to some degree because the viewport is small enough that you won’t miss the connection. But on desktop / tablet… way too big of a gap there.
3 Likes
I like the new darkened text, but I still miss the icon. Almost everything in Discourse has an icon, from posts having user avatars, to categories having the small color block, to the reply button having the arrow. Any chance to get the clock back (albeit shrunk to match the new text size)?
1 Like
The clock is far too noisy and just unnecessary. In a long conversation there could be a bunch of pauses in typical cases, whereas a bunch of close/open or other staff actions in a topic is quite unusual.