After using Discourse forums as a moderator on the official Age of Empires forums for several months now one of the features I would like to see tweaked with the platform is scrolling topics.
It is much easier for me to remember and find the page of a topic comment on a traditional forum that a comment number in a long topic string on a Discourse forum.
Would the Discourse team please consider implementing a section feature to represent pages for a standard number of comments, say 10-12, for a given topic?
You’re supposed to use the bookmark button under each post for that, no need to remember any numbers
I also recommend using the keyboard shortcuts (press ? on your keyboard to see all of them) to speed up navigation to specific posts and bookmarks.
Although I would argue that the bookmark button should be visible at all times instead of being hidden behind the … “show more” option, it would make the first step of the discobot tutorial easier too. You’d be surprised how many new users don’t have the courage to click that … button to find the bookmark.
There is hidden pagination stuff going on internally in Discourse to make it easier for search engines to crawl the content so maybe you could expose page numbers to users with some custom code, but it seems like everyone gets used to the infinite scrolling in the end.
I haven’t been bookmarking individual comments which may be of interest at a later date. Maybe I should start doing that.
How can I speed up navigation when viewing topics on a mobile device? Is there a way to pull up the Android on-screen keyboard on demand?
Our community has gone through a forum software change about 4 times in the last 8 years, so there are frequent questions about how everything works when it is not plainly obvious. The Discourse forum is the first to have infinite scrolling and some users do not like the change even if it may be better.
I’m mostly a desktop user so I’m not that familiar with the mobile view. Once you are logged in to Discourse the quickest way to the bookmarks seems to be through the bookmark button in the user popup menu. I couldn’t figure out how to use keyboard shortcuts on my phone.
My only real UX gripe with Discourse are those three buttons being so tiny. I wish they were the same size as the ones on the top bar. Even more so on mobile where you have to hit them with your thumb.
If my memory serves me correctly, I recently encountered something in the settings that allows for reordering of those buttons, as well as which ones can be always shown and which ones can be hidden under the 3 dots…
Edit: and I found it. It’s under the basic_setup tab in settings…
