I do like Discourse. I am a pioneer of Discourse in my company which transformed into a community thankfully by you, Team.
Is the search box not live anymore? From today the search has become different:
Search in the current topic option appears.
option number 1 now is the default (strange).
By default live search shows tags and users, why users?
Live search by topics needs to be activated after click. This point is the one important of all that today implemented. Early it was enough.
I tried to find related topics about feature requests similar to current changes and found nothing. I would like to return the old search back, please.
Thanks for the feedback! I really like the search changes, but the extra click is definitely a little more friction than we used to have.
I wonder if we can maybe show results without the click again, but also keep this extra click for āin all topics and postsā at the top, when relevant:
I do like this style much better than the old checkbox we had
You are right. That was discussed. Unfortunately I used mobile to surf Discourse 2-3 times.
Sorry, I meant the option to search in current topic is new (and unnecessary in most cases, probably it is useful only for very long topics). And it is on the first place. Old search worked fine. Now I cannot understand it. It is unable to use hot keys to find a topic to add it during composing.
Thank you for the reply. Live searching is a killer feature. No reasons to avoid it due to better visual style. Search must be simple and fast first. Fastly accessed search box is needed for fast search results. I cannot agree that current version is better. No live search and exessive clicks.
I donāt feel this a big problem because hitting ENTER is a pretty standard way to searching and with this two level search we have a more clearer look.
First level: users, categories, groups, tags
Second level: topics, posts
No, this isnāt new. Weāve had this for a while as a feature, if you are in a topic, a category, a tag or your PMs, you would previously see a checkbox to search in that specific context. What is new is that the checkbox has been replaced with a ākeyword in this topicā row.
This is a legitimate complaint. I worked on this change to search and I very much expected this to be raised as an issue. As @Don points out just above, you can hit Enter to search all topics. You can also use up/down arrows to navigate the available search results, so for a search in the current topic you would need to hit Arrow Down + Enter.
We are well aware this is not an easy adjustment especially for existing heavy users of search, itās difficult to adjust to the change because it feels much slower. But we made this change for a few reasons:
Better performance: launching a full search of all posts on every keystroke is expensive, the added friction to users comes with a big advantage for site managers. This might not have a lot of repercussions for self-hosters managing one site, but over many, many Discourse instances, the savings can be noticeable.
Simpler list of results: previously we had multiple columns in this search dropdown with the topic results on the left, and category/tag/user/group results on the right. That didnāt look great, there was a lot of different types of elements visible all at the same time.
Search as navigation: With the new changes, it is very quick to go to a specific category/tag/group/user without leaving the keyboard. For example, you can easily type part of a tag/categoryās name and then use Arrow Down + Enter to navigate to that tag/category page. (Previously, this took many key presses.)
Support for search history: this hasnāt been implemented yet, but we plan to add this soon, for authenticated users only, of course.
So, hopefully the search feels good after a short period of adjustment. That is our goal, but sometimes itās hard to make changes without causing at least some friction.
Do you mean the a shortcut isnāt working to add a search result to a topic? It works for me, although there is a regression (will fix shortly): it posts a relative URL in the composer, where previously it was an absolute URL.
This advice made me change my mind from āhate the new searchā to āitās ok and I applaud the lower performance impactā. It would be fantastic if this advice would be shown in the placeholder, which now just says āSearchā.
I will probably adjust to this, but I do have one minor thing.
I search for a word
Click on all topics and posts
Click on the only result and then I want to search within that topic, but I donāt get the āsearch this topicā after clicking on it.
The hamburger menu takes me to the Advanced Search and the only way I can get a prompt to search this topic is by putting a space after the search word.
Maybe Iām remembering incorrectly, but it seems that after clicking on a topic, I would get the prompt to search in the topic without altering the search word.
The reason why you arenāt seeing it is because the search panel is showing you the cached results from the previous screen. If you type something new in the input field, you should see the āsearch this topicā option.
Hm I see where you came from with this update, but Iām on the fence here.
My estimated behaviour would be:
when Iām on the homepage, the default search realm is āall topicsā
when Iām in a category/topic, that is the default search realm
In both cases, I would like to see the results of that realm instantly without a second click - just like before. Changing the realm via 1klick is ok though.
The hack ājust hit enterā? Yes this could work, but it rivals āshow, donāt tellā and ādonāt make me thinkā in terms of UX design.
The old search just felt snappier, more respnsive, more intuitive to use. Now I have to think about my behaviour.
I think this hack used by almost every website. Google, Youtube, Facebook etcā¦ They just add some suggestion to the search but the process is same like Discourse search. I know this is unusual in Discourse but it is just a habit. Iāve got pretty positive feedback from my community about the new search usage. I think this is add some good benefit us in performance.
The annoying hints, tags, and user listings seem to appear for the sole purpose of distracting attention from the fact that search no longer works (until additional user actions applied).
Yes, an extra press on Enter is not difficult. But why did the special search items appear on the screen? Does any ordinary user usually use them? I donāt think so. Right now, the pop-up tags and names of unknown users dropped down in packs is like an intrusive McDonaldās kiosk. I donāt want fried potatoes, but they offer them to me at every click.
Honestly, I would have been sympathetic to a pinned topic stating in advance that Discorse have to turn off live search because of performance issues. Those who own hosting have the option to stay on the version with the current settings for now.
But now there is no chance to roll back to beta6 or beta5. Rebuild crashes.
What does ctrl+enter do? I clicked when it appeared for the third time. There was nothing in the search box yet, so I was redirected to a blank screen with an error message.
I already sent the bug report about the cross-reference link bug today. You are right, there is such a problem. I wrote about hotkeys, that they are not so effective now, because there were additional clicks and I have to distract the screen to make sure that the keyboard arrow is selected the right option. Previously, the user didnāt care, because the default search in the current topic was off and it wasnāt easy to reach and enable it.
We have observed that pointless search work was the bulk of search work our servers did. Our servers did mountains of search work, on some sites it was the 2nd or 3rd most expensive route when it comes to total cost.
Our servers are very very fast, we can eat a lot of this pain. Self hosters on the other hand were paying a price that was way too high.
This is not in our plans, sure we will tweak and improve the design, possibly make the hinting richer and so on. However we have no plans to sail this ship back to the harbor.
Cheese has moved, I strongly recommend living with this for 14 days, providing feedback about little tweaks we can make to further improve the situation.
Thank you for the clarification. The problem is not technical. As a SaaS owner, Discourse pay is too much for pointless searches during a live search. Each userās move has a cost. Because Discourse is open source, I agree with the statement that the maintainer should have fewer costs. As a community member, I have to support the development team.
Anyway, the previous version of the search was configurable. Currently, some options (by tag, by a user, etc) became active while they used to be disabled by default.
Iām expressing the feelings of my users because they are not in this forum. I suppose most active users here are admins, developers, or designers from their self-hosted installations, so I hope my feedback is useful.
this was how i first saw the new search box. In my mental model everything below the box are results. So the search button looked like it was another type of result. I think design guidelines should prevent this kind of situation.
From my intuition the search button should be on the right next to the search box. Instead there is this search reset button. I only recognized it exits just now.
To my surprise google is also like this. It also has this weird search reset button that I never realized existed. The difference is, that google at least clearly distinguishes the search button from the results.
I think discourse did many things right from a UX perspective. But there are also some odd things. Sometimes changes are an improvement and sometimes they are just changes.
I think the root cause for this is, that changes are done in an ad hoc manner without a design system that is based on clearly defined guidelines. It grew from the intuitive knowledge its creators acquired over the years. The paradigms behind the UI decisions are not clearly verbalized and are made in a quasi dictatorial fashion.
A design system would be fully dictatorial, no? When it comes to this change specifically, what guidance could a design system have provided?
Are there examples of this? If this ever comes up feel free to ask about it on Meta, thereās some reasoning behind every change as far as I knowā¦ but itās true that we donāt announce the reasons for every change beyond the commit message that made the change.
Weāre quasi-dictatorial in that weāre the ones who will make the final call on what makes it into Discourse (someone has to), but there are a lot of factors that are considered. Performance was already mentioned, but input from our customers plays a major role because Discourse wouldnāt exist without them. We also operate Meta to specifically gather this type of feedback from the wider community of self-hosters, and weāll lurk site feedback categories on large sites (especially large migrations from other platforms) to get an idea of how things are going for regular users.
I do like this style much better than the old checkbox we had
