Everyone is welcome. This is a feature to let you directly invite someone to participate in a topic by entering their email address since they are not a member of the forum yet.
In that case my web browser is doing a poor job trying to show me as much as possible:
-W
Widths for text blocks are set in the web page. This was a decision by the UI designers at discourse.
We also choose to use a fixed width text box on our wiki
http://wiki.mcneel.com/
because text can become difficult to parse when it runs along the entire width of the screen.
Is your background really red? This looks like a bug in discourse that we should tell the developers about
I think these should initially be lifted as restrictions to new users.
As someone else pointed out; itâs VERY likely a new user has a question
regarding a file or needs to show an image of the problem.
This will create a threshold for most users, because in my experience there were
few first-posters on the NG that came by hust to say hello. Most had some sort of
issue that needed a solution.
What to do with a developer that has some code that does not work. However someone
responds the geometry he is working with might cause the trouble. How is he to hand over
a sample of that geometry?
-Willem
I agree.
Was this set to prevent some form of spam?
That would be my guess. We do spend quite a bit of time cleaning up spam from newsgroups and other forums. When the wiki was wide open, it quickly turned into a pretty nasty place due to spammer image posts.
Fortunately, if this forum works I would expect there to be quite a few âregularsâ online at all times and we could quickly catch and stop the spammers.
Iâll adjust the uploading settings for new users in a bit.
If things were egalitarian, everybody would be able to delete posts from the newsgroup (to clean up spam) and everybody would be able to ban users that were irritating. But itâs not egalitarian, and life never is.
The point of the tiered trust levels is to automatically give more and more day-to-day administrative trust to users who participate the most. Having you (yes, I mean Mitch specifically) be able to clean up untidy post titles and categories when a new person posts would be really awesome - much cleaner than having us do it, or forcing us to choose people to elevate to those positions.
This model has been well tested and well received on StackOverflow (another of Jeff Atwoodâs projects) - users gain status and can then help moderate. Only a few very active individuals get promoted to the level of being able to curate darn near anything.
I can see the objection to the system on a theoretical level, but Iâd like to see where it ends up in practice before declaring it a bust.
Hi Steve,
Indeed the text block should not be widened and I agree that readability will suffer.
My illustration was mostly to point out how much these textblocks are spread over the page. The density of the information is so low that it can really use some compacting.
Not sure if you are fooling or I did a good job in coloring, but the red unused spaced was done by me.
-Willem
This is on our roadmap and should be done in a couple of weeks
Sorry, I am really not following, can you explain explain this to me in laymenâs terms.
The CSS can easily be customised to fit whatever the mcneel sees fit.
This is up to @stevebaer, we set the defaults but @stevebaer can amend them if he feels like he feels the community, by default, is more trustworthy. The risk is that you can end up getting far more spam.
If you are feeling brave, take a shot at customising it to your liking with stylish and post the CSS here.
By Mcneel, as it used to happen in the Newsgroup .
Sorry Brian,
Constant moderation is nothing at all new and nothing which needed to get tested to get a feel for it.
Its effects are clear - moderation is the daily business in lots of forums, for years already - I find it dreadful, everywhere.
I so enjoyed that at Mcneel one (employees) thus far only got active to delete spam and ban Jon from time to time!
Sam, I hope you see that although we are a huge PITA most of the time we indeed seek helping things evolve⌠
1 picture is worth 1000 words?? (or at least a few dozen)
The left side is the current Ning implementation. Iâm not at all fond of it either, but I find it much easier to read than the right side. The type on the right side is bigger, so in theory it should be more readable, but there is so much visual clutter with all the other stuff that itâs not. And there is actually a lot more info visible on the left.
MHO⌠----H
(the image is 50% of ânormalâ size here)
edit: here is a link to full size : http://www.screencast.com/t/M8iwemcWuSmM
Even the Ning layout has a lot of fresh air. Longer term, I canât really see the point of avatars (once youâve recognised the âPosterâ, do you really pay any attention to it?). But thatâs an aside.
I know nothing about the inner workings of NNTP or HTML and I donât really need to as other folks are kind enough to sort that out so that numpties like me can enter discussions in places like this. When I first used a NG reader, I didnât give a moments thought to how someone had designed the GUI. That was just the way it was.
However, that was a long time ago - it now becomes apparent to me that someone had given a lot of thought to the structure and layout of such readers, but only because when Iâm confronted with the current vogue for âfluffyâ, I realise how elegant and efficient the old solutions are (soon to be were). Iâm making the distinction here between the method of delivering the service and the GUI. Iâve got no problem with moving to web, but donât throw the baby out with the bath water - a lot of the logic, structure and layout of the old NG style is worth preserving/developing.
Iâm reading this on a 30" screen and there is a lot of blank screen to look at, yet Iâve still got to scroll loads to read a thread. I try the same thing on my phone in portrait format and it works better, but the screen size means I have to zoom a fair bit. Would it be possible to have a split screen (user option to stack or side-by-side) showing threads in one and (magnified on the phone) body text in the other? There are features here that I really like (the ease of quote highlighting for one) but the basic, underlying structure of the GUI doesnât feel like itâs been given much thought.
The âcategoryâ headings look like they could rapidly descend into a meaningless (and also distracting) mess. In picking Rhino to develop the Discourse interface, theyâve picked a tough task master. Most of us here are Designers and weâve all got strong ideas and feelings as to what is right!
That side-by-side with NING is useful: it reminds me of why I hated NING. You can see 7 posts on the page. On Discourse, you can see 13 posts, and even more once you scroll the pinned posts off the screen. Discourse is much more like the newsgroup in that sense⌠less wasted vertical space, which is really all that matters. Seeing as many topics at once seems to be the one thing people really miss about newsgroups, seeing 60 topics all stacked up on one page. So the picture is worth 1000 words to me: Discourse is much more like the old newsgroup in the one way that really matters when talking about page density.
And⌠the visual clutter to the right I already easily filter out. But it does let me access some useful info VERY quickly when I want the info. A quick visual scan cn show me if someone whose response I want to see is in there. I honestly think a lot of the complaints are just people not used to an unfamiliar system. I think liking NING more when it in fact offers less density of information (a complaint youâre making about Discourse) sort of proves the point. Youâre used to NING, so you like it more, even though itâs truly offering you less of what you want: information density.
How do you do that?
I read this thread yesterday when there were only a very few replies and today the count is at 58 without any visual indication whatsoever of the fact that there are any posts in here that I havenât seen. What am I doing wrong?
w
I believe that the link in the âunreadâ section takes you to the first post that you havenât read in that topic. The posts are linearly arranged in the order of when they were posted, so only posts below where you start are ones you havenât read yet.