Ok, I had a look and can say

I started sub topics (several actually) out of this conversation because I think they merited their own top-level subject line.

I hate the fact that conversations in the newsgroup wander from topic to topic all within the same thread. Maybe you find it navigable, but I find it to be a mess.

On Discourse, multiple topics can relate to each other in complex ways. I can start in any topic and choose whether to be swept into another. Good luck referencing another post in a different thread on the newsgroup - the best you can do is “See jim’s third reply in ‘something wicked’, the one on March 22 at 3:00pm (GMT), where he says ‘ok, boys…’”

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Further, I thought it was worth educating viewers about a non-obvious navigation feature in Discourse. I figured the chances of educating new users in the future by having them read this thread was almost zero.

I am finding hard to comprehend the level of binary (black/white) resistance to something so simple … as if my view is seen as a threat to you in some clandestine attempt to overthrow you.

The thing is we are the recipients of this design to deal with on a daily basis, so it stands to reason we get to grade you, you don’t get to grade us. And it is not fair to mask your inflexibility as a case spoilededness, or hypercondrianism (word ?) on our part.

As a developer, when listening to something like this, I’d be like “sure, a concise thread view makes some sense as an added navigation feature … and since all the important hierarchical data are already there in code how about an button at the top that switches from flat view to tree and make all happy. Done. NEXT” …

Well, what happened yesterday night matches my objections I already expressed in Post 1. The makers of Discourse want to unroll a vision, they don’t want to provide a service.
Thoughtful suggestions, if not in line with their weltbild are therefore either completely ignored or arrogantly done away with. Instead we’re asked to…[quote=“sam, post:103, topic:155”]
give us feedback we can work with.
[/quote] Hehe, that’s too funny.

I don’t expect this attitude to change, only because some Rhino Users have entered the arena.
It get’s assumed that those who find readability inferior just haven’t found the tools yet, which make this communication tool so much more advanced than a newsgroup. Those trolls who keep making noise should get taken care of at some point.

Incidentally and as stated before I also strongly disagree with @codinghorror 's visions of community management which are intended to get rolled out in later incarnations of this framework and weft into the code. Already now Search results are biased by “Likes” and “Trust Level”. These days one probably has to be an American to newly design a forum framework which - while possibly unwillingly - clearly took bits and pieces from the totalitarian toolbox.Everywhere else in the world, especially here in Europe one would harvested massive shitstorms with such a proposal.

This system indeed is strict.
It does not even allow the user not to take part in this silly ranking business and to hide all traces of this from the GUI, once and for all time. Jim wished for…

No, jim, this won’t be possible.
From the developer response we already got it got quite obvious that it’s not even worth asking for this in the Discourse Meta forum. Bringing such forward there was just a waste of time.

No. I can’t take this lightly.
Yeah McNeel employees already indicated that they will carefully evaluate each means of community control, but it already got evident that a lot of knobs are not in their hands. I also agree that there’s no right life in the wrong one. It would still feel wrong to me to use this Software although a lot of stuff was turned off. One had so much choice: Why can’t one simply use any other Forum framework?

Here one does not have to deal with questionable visionaires.

Right Thomas! That’s exactly what I miss here too.

Yes Steve! That’s what I had in mind with my proposal in “Hello… and what I don’t like about discourse”

btw, I do like in discourse the easy linking to another post :slight_smile:

thx,
Tobias

Our goal around search is quite simple, provide the most effective results to the users searching the forum. There is still a lot of work to do in that area. Google use 100s of signals to bias search results, it seems to work well enough for them.

I agree we do not have a best in class search yet, but we strive to have one.

I have no idea what you are talking about with “trust levels biasing search results” this is not the case.

Do you mind explaining how from that line-up of icons in your picture one can tell who is replying to whom.?

It is not that anyone is claiming Discourse has no tools for good communication, but your extraordinary animus to giving the user the tools to see an overview of who is replying to whom is baffling. One can only imagine what extraordinary bad experience brought on this superstitious fear of implementing such a tool.

Well, You have decided it is hopeless. I haven’t yet.

They ask us to come here and give feedback, but the evidence is mounting that is going to be just a waste of our time.

You see this as a lot more nefarious than I do. As the saying goes there is no need to ascribe mal-intent to what can be explained by incompetence.

I for one admire two things about the discourse team:

  1. They are willing to have a clear vision and design for what they think will be a wonderful tool.

  2. They are unwilling to complicate their product needlessly with requests from people new to the system.

If you were to look at some if the hideous code we maintain to keep the zillions of options working in Rhino, you might wonder if we’d have been better off saying ‘no’ or giving each option much better consideration.

So far you guys have argued that threads make it easier to understand the message structure. But I don’t get it. It doesn’t seem easier than Discourse to me.

I have seen lots of personal attacks, but no real evidence of anything other than “I like threaded newsgroups better.”

I personally hope Sam and Jeff stick to their guns, wait this out, and see what you think in 3 months.

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You might read my posts a bit more carefully.
My main concern clearly is not readability, that’s one of the things I think dont work right.
You simply skip over what bugs me most, just as the Discourse Makers do, that’s not the way I want to lead discussions.

H.

When a number of people complain about an issue, it should be a hint that something is amiss.
So far from all the developer responses I have not seen any evidence that flat view is superior other than we “like it, and what we like goes”.

It is rather bizarre that a removal of a feature is seen as a feature.

I’m sorry you feel that way Mitch. It was never my intention to make people feel that we are dismissing their concerns about the usability of this system. Yes, I have spent a significant amount of time researching different alternatives and chose discourse so I guess that does make me a bit “personally invested”. I do feel that the system will improve over time based on user feedback and that the guys at discourse do care about what users say (otherwise they wouldn’t be posting responses on this forum.)

I am also picking up on the architecture of discourse and can make changes to the system myself (there will be what I hope you guys will think a really cool image/file attachment feature in next week’s build.) Of course I don’t want to spend a significant portion of my time working on discourse architecture since it probably makes more sense that I do things like type on Rhino 6, but at least this is possible. I wouldn’t even have a clue where to begin making tweaks to a vbulletin system like our current python forum and the ning forums are a closed system.

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@stevebaer : that comment was never aimed at you, I know you are doing what you can to try and make this work for as many people as possible.
----H

I have read no personal attacks. and nobody has said “I like threaded newsgroups better”. Holger (who you were responding to} has said nothing about threading. Maybe you should read what his concerns are.

Discourse has the same threading as newsgroups - Discourse just doesn’t handle it well.

Another big problem I see is the issue of what has been read and what has not.
There have already been numerous discussions about not being able to tell what has been read. I’ve seen no reasonable explanation of how that is supposed to work.

This whole thread is making my head spin. Lots of repetitive discussion with the ball being hit back and forth over the net again and again.

Does this forum support polls (something the NG never could do)? At least then it would be possible to gauge the proportion supportive (or otherwise) of the current Discourse framework.

This is an issue of mine as well. In the newsgroup - with my (albeit primitive) newsreader client, one had TWO indications of read or unread-ness:

  1. Posts or threads with unread messages would be in BOLD
  2. With the views dropdown, you could show or hide read messages

That made it very easy to sort through and see what you haven’t read. I haven’t found that functionality here - especially the ability to hide read threads - and I have spent a lot of time in the last few days going back and forth between a particular topic and the “unread” section (the only way to see if there’s something you haven’t read) to see if anything new popped up. In a newsreader, one always the overall view at the same time as the particular post you’re reading (or several posts, if you want to open them in their own windows)
----H

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I’ve gone back and scanned through several topics and found messages i hadn’t
read (discourse thinks I read them). That is just way too much work to do on a regular basis.

If you visit the forum several times a day, it is probably is manageable, but I won’t be doing that every day and neither will the vast majority of visitors.

That’s actually pretty damn handy. There’s many times I’m only looking for certain responses in a thread. I didn’t realize that option before.

How do you get that view?