Today we have installed a new version of the usercard on the meta forums. We are doing this to gather feedback from you and see what works / doesnt work.
As with any experiment, I assume there will be some issues that possibly arise with this new usercard.
Please use this topic to report visual / functional bugs, as well as your opinions on the card itself.
Just an FYI, as bugs are fixed, I will delete the post that reported the bug to decrease the amount of content to sort through
Use it on your own forum
As mentioned above, this is still an experiment. We do not plan on supporting this long term as a theme component as the long term goal is to integrate this into core as a new user card. That being said, if you wish to use this on your forum now you can by installing it via → GitHub - discourse/experimental-usercard
Also I see two website urls in different layout. This was also the case until some weeks ago and was fixed by @merefield - but on the old usercard there were two websites and no location.
Can we try removing the background color of the image element for the avatar? Avatars from people who went out of their way to use transparent PNGs for the background now look worse.
The background / header image on the user card is less than half of the height we had before, I wonder if we could give it a bit more
One thing I’d love to see different is the header. I’d even say I find it a bit sad right now:
Putting a background image doesn’t feel so original and supporting community features. The location tag feels a bit like on a file. And badges are minimized and put on a corner.
I love badges and from my experiences many community managers love to get creative around badges. I’d love to see badges be more celebrated, rather than minimized on the new cards! You know, something like this:
Might be worth adding some custom CSS to your site to address this. Since this isnt an official discourse plugin, I’m not sure I would add css to support this as this will possibly be merged into core eventually.
I’m sorry to be negative, particularly given I don’t have many suggestions for improvement, but honestly my first impression was to literally say “yuck, oh yuck, is this a bug?”. That doesn’t mean I’m right, that doesn’t mean these aren’t an improvement for everybody else, but for me the old user cards were really nice and simple and something I would not have changed.
Maybe it will grow on me?
Key points:
Badges are super useful for qualification purposes and should be on usercards – Nothing says “This is who I am…” better than “I’ve made these kind of contributions so far”. I guess they’re in the top right now, but I only figured that out after looking through several user cards.
The tag style boxes for “posted”, “cheers”, “solutions” etc grabs my eye way too much. Maybe it’s also the bold font? I liked how subtle this information was in the previous user card. Why? Because I don’t really care about it.
The cakeday aspect also comes into the “don’t care” category. It’s fun and nice, but when I want to find out more about a user, is that really one of the four most important things I want to know about them? Probably not.
I would swap the cakeday into the top right, and move the badges back into being a full row or two, with the full expanded name of the featured badges. Most users won’t know what the icons mean and need the text elaboration. This further advertises the badges which are available, invoking curiosity in some users to contribute more if they want a particular badge they see on someone else’s user card.
I know that the issues I see are caused by the Locations plugin. The reason why I brought this up here is because this plugin seems to be very common. Also I would say that CSS or code adjustments need to be done in the plugin and not on Discourse core, at least mainly. And I hope that the people maintaining the Locations plugin will look into this. And to be honest, if the new usercard will become core, they more or less have to.
I just wanted to address the issues I have here in the topic for everybody.
Just found a few more things a bit wrong with it, this time with the shimmer animation.
First off, they’re all on different cycles. Best seen if you disconnect from wifi and then click on a card:
I love more minimalistic approach, and there is still one main question without direct answer:
Is the concept of user cards just a decorative element without any real purpose? I reckon the most of users are using it just to send a PM or opening a chat channel. So… should we clean up it more instead of increasing fast visible elements?
Needs of admins/moderators are totally different playground.
If this get an overhaul, I think it could be a good chance to remove the trust level info from badges. They are not badges but group membership, indicating authority and access rights on the forum.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but it looks horrible on my site. Lots of information is missing. I tried this without any other CSS, and this is what it looks like. Maybe a plugin conflict, or something else going on?
It’s an official plugin causing the issue, not sure which one. I first disabled unnofficial and it looked the same, but disabling all caused it to work. Here’s the error in the console:
, cakeday, are worthy to show?
