In general I’m happy that McNeel moved to the web interface. Now at least a few of my students will make use of the forum.
However like some others there are a few things I miss from the news reader version.
One is being able to expand and contract threads, but it seems that
there was a philosophical decision not to allow that. I’d be curious
as to why? Why not have it as an option?
I liked having the time/date of posts. The “Activity” column is a bit vague and hard to decipher.
(this bullet “feature” in the editor doesn’t seem to work very well - I have to renew it for each new bullet).
I really liked how my newsreader would start me at the first unread post in a thread, and that the historic posts were available but not in the way. In Discourse I can click on “new” topics but it gives me the topics in every category. I usually just want Rhino for Windows.
I can’t really figure out how the “unread” works at all. It’s seems somewhat arbitrary in what it shows.
I’ve seen threads about quotes and I would put my vote with having a different background colour, perhaps even just the indented version but with a background change.
Also seen the threads about using Stylish. I don’t have the time nor the expertise to customize the forum on my own. Perhaps if there was a way to just see a list of styles and with one click change the look (like with GMail) that would work for me.
You click on the image icon and you can choose any file with the following extensions:
.dwg or .dxf or .zip or .7z or .rar or .igs or .stp or .step or .rhp or .gh or .gha or .ghx or .py or .rvb or .rui or .txt or .pdf or .png or .jpg or .jpeg or .gif or .rmtl or .renv or .3dm
They should add the file types associated with the render plug-ins like .vismat and .visopt for V-Ray and some more image types like .exr and .hdr
Ability to set colors - mainly because the difference between read and unread
messages is not great enough.
Date and time of posts displayed.
Unread doesn’t work very well for me.
Compact view available.
Set Category view as default for me so I always get category view when I
go to discourse.
Separate Read/Unread from Tracking. I want to see
everything whether I’m tracking it or not. Perhaps add a way to
manually set tracking per thread and then be able to look at just the
topics being tracked. I guess this is like using Favorite, but not quite.
The bullet formatting sucks big time. Making this list was REALLY tedious, and it shouldn’t be. This should work just like Google mail. 1) Select previously typed text to make into bullet item. Click the bullet button. Each paragraph should get a new bullet. 2} Press Enter at the end of a list item. The next paragraph should be a list item at the same level. 3) Press Enter twice to return to normal text.
You can do this by changing the notification option at the bottom, where it says “Regular” or “Tracking”, click the button to change that to whatever you prefer per topic. You can change tracking behavior globally via your user preferences.
Yes, but I’m still not sure this does what I want. I’ll try it some more.
My wish is for this to be a Preference.
I don’t want to hover. I just wish to see the time of the post without action on my part.
I was wishing they worked differently. I shouldn’t have to do that typing. And I can’t “post-format” a group of paragraphs. My wish is that it work like Google mail.
So in your user preferences turn off (uncheck) everything under e-mail.
Discourse will always take you to the last post you read in a topic. If you want to be notified of new posts in a topic (not email, just visual notification), change the “automatically track topics I enter” and “Consider topics new when” settings in your user preferences.
Generally we only track (notify of new posts visually) for a particular topic when you post a reply to that topic, or you spend 4+ minutes reading that topic. This is what the default settings in everyone’s user preferences are.
Is it just me or did you guys just move that into that space? (I liked it better under the poster’s name).
Anyway, here is a vote to having it verbose by default and perhaps a mouseover if one needed to find out how long ago that was.
I already have all notifications turned off. I mentioned that in case it has some bearing on read/unread issue.
I understand how topics get labeled as “tracking” or “regular” but I’m not finding this to be a very reliable way of keeping track of what I have read and what I haven’t. I sometimes find topics that are marked unread and when I go there I don’t see anything new. Other times I discover messages that I haven’t read in a topic that is marked read.
One problem with that for me is that I can’t foretell the future so I don’t always know what I will be interested in reading. Topics can become interesting or they can become boring. The solution for that seems to be to turn on tracking for all topics and look at every new message. I was hoping there was something a little more efficient.
If every topic could be interesting in the future, how could there possibly be somrthing more efficient than reading each post? I guess Discourse could start tracking topics for you after they have N likes?
Once I learned that Discourse takes 3 seconds to refister something as read, i have found that the automatic tracking works pretty well.
You have that backwards. The several people who go around stabbing the heart button all the time don’t seem to be a very good indicator of my interests. I would rather know when lively discussion occurs without a lot of heart stabbing.
The question is how can one reliably determine what has been read and what hasn’t. There are lots of different circumstances where the system fails. There are more types of failures than I can enumerate. All I can tell you is I often find messages that are supposedly read but I haven’t read them, and I get sent to pages where there are supposed to be unread messages but I have already read them.
One circumstance where I know it fails consistently is when I have read only some of the messages in a topic due to lack of time or interest. Later if I have the time and interest there is no way of knowing what is read and what isn’t.
@brian@sam For me this seems the case as well.
The way Discourse determines what I read and what not, fails to reflect reality. Is there an overview of how Discourse does this? Maybe that can clarify why it fails in so many cases? I might be able to alter my ways to make it work.
I could say +1 or maybe I should “like” this post, however liking a bug report seems kinda strange to me… So I’ll simply say this is happening to me too.
–Mitch
I agree that with default settings, tracking and marking as read seems bizarre. Only topics you reply to or read for 4+ minutes are automatically tracked. I have Discourse set to track all topics, which works for me for now because I want to read them all. If I didn’t, there would be no setting that makes sense for me.
I know Sam is working on an idea for tracking by category, and that may solve a lot of this.
As for jim’s comment about topics I don’t have time or an interest to read now, but may later, I am using bookmarks. That doesn’t help me track what I have read in a thread, but it gets me back to the thread, and I find scanning the topic to be a much faster operation than clicking through the threads in the news reader. So, for me, this is not a huge problem - I am developing different habits using discourse, because the ones that were familiar with a newsreader don’t work here.
I am not sure I would make much use of a reply-by-reply read/unread flag. Plus, the way discourse is built may not allow for it at all - it may just track your read state in each topic with a single number - the reply you read most recently.
I have changed the default settings, but I still have trouble with occasionally finding topics I am tracking have unread messages that I haven’t seen; also that some topics marked as unread I have already read all the messages in them. Despite that the tracking is supposed to be “instant” I am finding there is a time lag…
–Mitch
