UX: allows to click on topic item for bulk select

UX
1

I’m a user of a Discourse based forum, not someone who “runs” a forum. I did notice a change one or two days ago regarding bulk select and when I reported it on that forum I was pointed to https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/36102.

I usually spend a lot of time on this specific forum (you can say an unhealthy long time) and below is my workflow when I visit the forum first time in the day.

  1. Attend to notifications (right top user icon).
  2. Attend to unread topics.
    • Possibly read some.
    • Dismiss the remaining ones (without bulk select).
  3. Attend to new topics.
    • Possibly read the first few ones.
    • Start bulk select.
    • Select a number of topics.
    • While selecting I might encounter one that I want to read so I click it.
      • As far as I remember I could read a non-selected topic while in bulk select mode in the past.
      • If I dismiss the selected items and next I want to read one of the remaining items I first have to get out of bulk select mode.

So for me this change is definitely not an improvement.

I also don’t buy the motivation “you had to exactly click on the checkbox to select a topic row”. But I don’t do bulk selects on mobiles; on a mobile I actually stay far away from any actions that I can do as a TL4 user that I consider “dangerous” like merging and usually also moving topics.

  1. I’m curious why somebody thought that this was an improvement?
  2. Is this setting configurable? So an admin can change it if desired.

Notes:
I did search the UX category for bulk select but did I was not able to find a recent one covering this topic.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the feedback!

This was the motivation behind change! sometimes while bulk selecting someone could misclick the title instead of the checkbox and lose their bulk-selection work.

The initial idea was to remember bulk selected topics so they’d still be there on return… but this lead to full-row selection as a method of avoiding the issue. Other apps also do this, though it may more often be a mobile-specific behavior.

So that’s the why

It isn’t currently… but if we receive more feedback around this change we could do something like that or possibly diverge the behavior based on screen size.

5 Likes
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I am running into this exact problem as well, daily. I can’t use bulk select AND read some topics anymore, since topic titles on desktop are no longer clickable.

Could one solution here be to select the row only when clicking/tapping outside a link target @j.jaffeux?

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You certainly can’t navigate in the same tab while bulk selecting, right? So what if (cmd/ctrl)-click and middle click still allow you to open it in a new tab?

IMO this would get us back to square one:

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True, in my use case, I’m 99% command + clicking. That would certainly alleviate most of the pain.

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<ctrl>click to select, <click> to read will more than likely work for me. It would be wonderful if the selection would be restored afterwards.

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Just thinking: how easy would <ctrl>click be for users with mobile phones?

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While that doesn’t work now, and CTRL+click is overridden, you can still right-click for the ‘Open link in new tab’ option. Not what you’re used to, but pretty easy.

Maybe for mobile it would need a long-press action.

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Hmm… but that might activate the browser right-click behaviour on mobile.