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.
- Attend to notifications (right top user icon).
- Attend to unread topics.
- Possibly read some.
- Dismiss the remaining ones (without bulk select).
- 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.
- I’m curious why somebody thought that this was an improvement?
- 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.