Discourse?



  • From what I've seen on this forum, most opinions of Discourse (read: NOT DISQUS) are negative. Why is that? I just installed it on my home server and it's a lot faster and looks nicer than Community Server. It's pretty damn easy to install and upgrade too. Why the negative reaction to the word "Discourse"?



  • Apparently you missed the thread where it is explained in detail what is wrong with Discourse.

     @Ben L. said:

    it's a lot faster and looks nicer than Community Server
    Anything is faster and nicer than Community Server. That's not much of a selling point. But fast and nice aren't the problem. The problem with Discourse is that it tries to "fix" a lot of things that aren't broken.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Apparently you missed the thread where it is explained in detail what is wrong with Discourse.

    That's not a list of problems with Discourse. That's a problem with the marketing terms used to describe Discourse written by someone whose only knowledge of Discourse was from that marketing.

    Here's a sandbox installation of Discourse. Those marketing-speak terms refer to actual features. For example:


    This post has 1 reply somewhere else in the thread.


    If I click "1 Reply" I get to see the reply in-place. The thread layout is still flat, so I can use the feature of threaded layouts (ie. being able to see context for replies) without it being hard to find the posts in a thread that have appeared since last time I read it.


    Clicking the arrow brings me to the actual post. Here we can see that it is a reply to another post, and below it, there is a partial quote of it in a third post.


    The upside-down caret lets me see the context for the partial quote without scrolling.


    If I click the "in reply to" text, the parent post shows up without me losing my place in the thread.

    See? The marketing-speak actually means real things! That's not normal for marketing-speak!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    Apparently you missed the thread where it is explained in detail what is wrong with Discourse.

    That's not a list of problems with Discourse. That's a problem with the marketing terms used to describe Discourse written by someone whose only knowledge of Discourse was from that marketing.

    I suggest you re-read the post that was linked to, especially with regards to navigation of a thread 'conversation'.



  • @PJH said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @El_Heffe said:

    Apparently you missed the thread where it is explained in detail what is wrong with Discourse.

    That's not a list of problems with Discourse. That's a problem with the marketing terms used to describe Discourse written by someone whose only knowledge of Discourse was from that marketing.

    I suggest you re-read the post that was linked to, especially with regards to navigation of a thread 'conversation' topic.

    @Lorne Kates said:
    Fuck you, Discourse. So now I have no idea how long the conversation actually is. I have no way of directly jumping to an arbitrary point in the conversation. If it's a 1000 reply thread, I can't read page 1, page 2-- hop to page 50 to get an idea of the conversation flow, then jump straight to page 100 to see the latest posts. If I refresh the browser or navigate away accidentally, I lose my spot and have to start infinite-scrolling again. I can never use the scroll bar as a gague as to how far into a conversation I am. This is assuming you don't fuck up scrolling like nearly ever infinite-scroll application I've ever used.

    I also can't just hit CTRL-END to jump to the end of a page.

    You know what else provided "just in time" access to more posts? A FUCKING NEXT BUTTON!

    Once again, this comes from not using the product and just interpreting the marketing-speak. For example, go to This specific post.


    There's also this neat little gadget on every topic. Click the left half and you go to the OP. Click the right half and you go to the last post in the thread.



  • @Ben L. said:

    Here's a sandbox installation of Discourse.
    @Ben L. said:
    Once again, this comes from not using the product and just interpreting the marketing-speak.
    How exactly do you know that he hasn't used Discourse? I don't know either, but he raises some (possibly) legitimate issues. More importantly, you don't address any of those complaints:

    1. I have no idea how long the conversation actually is
    2. I have no way of directly jumping to an arbitrary point in the conversation
    3. If it's a 1000 reply thread, I can't read page 1, page 2-- hop to page 50 to get an idea of the conversation flow, then jump straight to page 100 to see the latest posts
    4. If I refresh the browser or navigate away accidentally, I lose my spot and have to start infinite-scrolling again
    5. I can never use the scroll bar as a gague as to how far into a conversation I am
    6. I can't just hit CTRL-END to jump to the end of a page

    Looking at the sandboxed example it's hard to tell if those complaints are legitimate because there are so few posts. It's not a real-life example. On a real forum with hundreds of thousands of posts in thousands of threads, if Lorne's complaints are valid, I would consider it to be an annoying unusable system that's even worse than CS. As bad as CS is, its problems are from shitty, incompetent programming, not bad design.  @Ben L. said:


    There's also this neat little gadget on every topic. Click the left half and you go to the OP. Click the right half and you go to the last post in the thread.
    That's a good example of what I mean. When I first I looked at the Discourse example from your link I had no idea what that thing was or what it did. It was just this annoying thing that was always on the screen as I scrolled through the posts.

    On the other hand, CS, which is possiblly the shittiest software ever written, has something on every page that needs no explanation:

      And it doesn't follow me around. It stays in one place and if I need it, I know where it is.

    Everyone has their own opinions, and their own likes and dislikes, but Discourse tries to "fix" things that don't need to be fixed.

     



  • I'll use this thread to explain this stuff.
    @El_Heffe said:

    1. I have no idea how long the conversation actually is

    It is 19 posts long. X of Y generally means there are Y items and you are at the Xth item. This is no different.

    @El_Heffe said:

    2. I have no way of directly jumping to an arbitrary point in the conversation

    Can someone present a use case for jumping to an arbitrary point in a conversation without a reference to that point?

    @El_Heffe said:

    3. If it's a 1000 reply thread, I can't read page 1, page 2-- hop to page 50 to get an idea of the conversation flow, then jump straight to page 100 to see the latest posts

    There are no pages. Still, if you want to get to post 50, you can either scroll there or change the number in your address bar. I've never seen a forum that listed the 50th page from the 2nd page when there were 100 pages.

    @El_Heffe said:

    4. If I refresh the browser or navigate away accidentally, I lose my spot and have to start infinite-scrolling again

    Nope. That's wrong. Go ahead, scroll down on the page I linked and watch your address bar.

    @El_Heffe said:

    5. I can never use the scroll bar as a gague as to how far into a conversation I am

    The little widget tells you that. It also doesn't get fooled by long posts versus short posts.

    @El_Heffe said:

    6. I can't just hit CTRL-END to jump to the end of a page

    I generally scroll with the wheel on my mouse, so clicking the right half of a large target is pretty easy for me. The left half of the X of Y thing brings you to the top and the right half brings you to the bottom.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    Can someone present a use case for jumping to an arbitrary point in a conversation without a reference to that point?

    @El_Heffe said:

    3. If it's a 1000 reply thread, I can't read page 1, page 2-- hop to page 50 to get an idea of the conversation flow, then jump straight to page 100 to see the latest posts
    Yes. You quoted it yourself in your own post immediately after asking the question, (the concept of 'page' being completely absent in Discourse notwithstanding, but you get the point. If you really want to play dense, pretend there are 10 posts per page and interpret it as "can't read posts 1-29, hop to post 500 to see how it's going, then go to post 990 to see the latest.)



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I can't just hit CTRL-END to jump to the end of a page
     

    You mean just End? Ctrl+End doesn't do anything.



  • @Ben L. said:

    I generally scroll with the wheel on my mouse
     

    I do both.

    • Does End not scroll to the very last post?
    • On Vanilla, however, I don't need to use End, because the forum remembers where I was and auto-anchors me to the last post before new ones. It's pretty great. I wish CS did that so I don't have to manually click the last page and hit End. Does Discourse do that?
    • Does Discourse allow subselection quoting, like CS? Because that's pretty great too.



  • @dhromed said:

    • Does End not scroll to the very last post?

    It scrolls to the last-loaded post. If you want the last post in Discourse, click the right half of the "X of Y" thing.
    @dhromed said:
    • On Vanilla, however, I don't need to use End, because the forum remembers where I was and auto-anchors me to the last post before new ones. It's pretty great. I wish CS did that so I don't have to manually click the last page and hit End. Does Discourse do that?

    Yep, Discourse (and phpBB and Vanilla and countless other non-community server forums) remembers the last post you read. Additionally, Discourse has a definition of "read" other than "went to the same page as".
    @dhromed said:
    • Does Discourse allow subselection quoting, like CS? Because that's pretty great too.

    Yep. It's slightly better than CS, as well, since quotes know which post they're from, so it can show context.



  • Is it just me/the sandbox or is Discourse much slower than TDWTF CS? Just navigating around feels laggy compared to the relatively plain HTML of these current forums. I am on a Nexus 4, so not sure if that makes a difference, or if it's the latency to the server, or what.



  •  I went to a thread and the page js-reloads when I hit Home? What the hell is up with that? Really breaks the feeling of speediness.

     

    Oh god, it dynamically and constantly loads and unloads posts based on where you are in the thread. I guess that answers my earlier question of what happens when you have a long thread and you read it all. It does feel wayyyy slower than pages, even though numerically it might be faster. And I imagine your site is going to be absolutely hammered with requests single posts? If I interpret the net tab correctly, I estimate the about of http requests will be 2-5 times as much as with CS. But they won't include the tag cloud, of course. :)



  • Due to all this js-loading, all loading (threads, overviews, the back button, the forward button) is slower and feels clunky.



  • Yeah that's why I asked about mobile, I use this site from a mobile phone pretty often and it's a shitty Windows Phone 7 one. Gonna upgrade in a few months though.



  •  @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah that's why I asked about mobile, I use this site from a mobile phone pretty often *and* it's a shitty Windows Phone 7 one. Gonna upgrade in a few months though.

     

    which one you will get? considering you bad mouth google and also apple, you should get a blackberry! 





  • @ben_lubar Nice:
    0_1489732257494_postusericontext.PNG


  • 🚽 Regular

    Who's this guy? His face looks familiar.


    Ben L.



  • @Zecc We got rid of him a coupe of years back. He would never stop posting about Dwarf Fortress and Lojban, the bastard.



  • @Zecc It's the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Past. He looks familiar because the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Present and the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Yet to Come have also posted in this thread.


  • BINNED

    @julmu said in Discourse?:

    @Zecc It's the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Past. He looks familiar because the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Present and the Ben Lubar of TDWTF Yet to Come have also posted in this thread.

    Oooooooh! It's the Lubar or the Forum Past! Here to remind us of the Tag Clouds and Signature Guy, and how they brought us joy before we got jaded and cold!


  • FoxDev

    @ben_lubar said in Discourse?:

    0_1489731082902_Screenshot 2017-03-17 at 01.09.56.png

    Source: https://xkcd.com/1812/

    GODDESS DAMNIT FBMAC!


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @Ben-L. said in Discourse?:

    Why is that?

    Have you reached a satisfactory answer yet, @ben_lubar ? I'm curious what you found 🚎


  • BINNED



  • @Onyx I feel like that cycle is incomplete. It needs to take the shredded paper, mix it with water, finely grind it into a pulp, expel most of the moisture, press the damp pulp into a thin layer, dry it, cut it, and return it to the printer for re-use.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @anotherusername There also needs to be something taking a picture of the paper before it hits the shredder.


  • Java Dev

    @anotherusername


  • BINNED

    @PleegWat said in Discourse?:

    not much bigger than your break room's coffee station

    :wtf: It's bigger then our entire break area


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Luhmann said in Discourse?:

    then

    The word is "than". It's the third time I see you make this mistake, which is why I'm mentioning it.

    Edit to add: The other two times were four days ago, so it's not like you're doing this mistake all the time. But I've seen you doing it consistently lately, so I pointing it out just like I would have wanted it to be pointed to me if I were the one doing it.

    Edited again to add: if that's you're way of trolling native English righters than your doing fine.



  • @Zecc I would call :pendant: , but if that was the 3rd time than it was ok


  • BINNED

    @Zecc said in Discourse?:

    if that's you're way of trolling native English righters

    Naturally

    👀 :seye:


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @PleegWat said in Discourse?:

    something that beggars belief

    Wat?


  • Java Dev

    @Tsaukpaetra Beats me. I read about the thing in a magazine ages ago and just linked the first google result that oneboxed.





  • @Zecc said in Discourse?:

    if that's you're way of trolling native English righters than your doing fine.

    0_1490029378495_seeWhatYouDid.jpg



  • @boomzilla said in Discourse?:

    @anotherusername There also needs to be something taking a picture of the paper before it hits the shredder.

    With the prerequisite wooden table behind it.


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