Easy to do – expand the topic map under the first post, then click on the avatars for Heath and Jim. Voila, you have filtered the topic down to just posts by those two users!
(If you need to get back to the first post, click the topic title, that will always take you to the top, or use the navigational up arrow on the progress bar.)
There is also a “best of” mode when topics get long that let you filter to just the replies that had the most interaction (likes, bookmarks, read time, replies, external and internal links, etcetera).
This position is based on data derived from studying 10+ year old web discussion communities, those that survived and thrived.
A discussion exists. It’s not threaded. You can, however, click the replies indicator to expand the replies to this (or any other post) inline. You can also click the above quotes to expand them and see the full context of the quote. So it’s more like, 1 level of on-demand threading.
This is like walking about with a microscope for glasses. Yes you can see, in theory, but try it in practice. Just because you can see the molecules of the floor does not mean you know what is happening around you.
To answer you question … first post ? which first post ? You expect me to guess ahead of time which names I want to put in a search function ? (because there is no way I am scrolling up and down this page). In a threaded view I can see all the participants in their correct discussion order. Sometimes a Heath+Pascal duo may be interesting or a Mitch+Jim, but I would not know it unless I see the thread relationship in a forest-view format.
If your opinion is newsgroups and desktop UI = good, anything on the web that is not tree based = bad, we are going to have very hard time absorbing this feedback.
We are trying to create a tool that enables friction free effective communication. Clearly it has to be opinionated, but we are open to feedback. If the feedback is throw everything away and do what I want you to do … well … what do you expect us to do?
Help us refine this product, give us feedback we can work with.
On a personal level I am a firm believer in Kaizen
Small changes, repeated 1000s of times effectively, lead to major awesomeness.
Now you see this specific forum is serving to a bunch of smart and strongly opinionated guys. More than once this community was pointed as one of the most valuable assets to Rhino 3D.
And it’s power was being diluted because a newer user base won’t use NNTP while the old boys won’t bother logging into the web forums.
Discourse is a move by McNeel in order to merge back the two groups. And many people really see the tree structure as important. To their work and way of thinking. That can’t be just put aside in an ‘I know better’ basis.
There is a lot more to the interface than it seems at first glance. The bar under the OP is indeed very powerful and I hadn’t noticed it until highlighted here. The ability to pull a full line of discussion together by clicking the replies area under one post also. Editing with history is priceless.
But it also might be true that adding a tree map somewhere and being able to select a portion of it for reading might work as well.
Yes it is working,
No I am not convinced (yet) that this is either because or despite of how Discourse is setup.
We are having a great discussion for sure, but replies and quotes are all over the place.
It might very well be that we will need to get used to it. And I have no doubt that a @discourse
and all others involved, put a lot of effort in trying to create a smart and new way to setup a discussion
platform. I can already see some very useful functionality that a NNTP based reader lacks.
I am not convinced yet that the setup is not too dogmatic in the area of discussion structure, and I get suspicious when a tree-structure is dismissed for being complex and hard to navigate. If as a result smart navigation is
hidden in a “sorted by date” list of replies by vague and fading buttons, I do not know if the goal of making it easier is met.
For now I think I need to do some more testing and just hang around to see if it starts to grow a little on me.
That’s it jim, road maps.
The thing I love the most about old NNTP is threading, it was not perfect, but good. And it used the screen estate better. I don’t buy a higher res monitor to waste it on more empty space between the lines, i do so to fit more stuff in. So hopefully they will remove a lot of the empty space in the future. And add some kind of road map. Maybe a side by side tree like a “family tree” would be even better than the NNTP tree.
I work on a project now where lot’s of people are linked in on the emails, and not a day goes by where I don’t miss threading, as right now we have no way to see if any others has responded. We have to look through every mail to do so, and that steals a lot of time. I don’t want to read a newsgroup, I want to efficiently find and comment the info I find relevant. Same goes here and on any other platform.
90+ posts is a small topic. And one participant (you) had to start another topic because he was convinced his message would be lost from sight in this topic.
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…’”
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.
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.
I for one admire two things about the discourse team:
They are willing to have a clear vision and design for what they think will be a wonderful tool.
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.
