Forum-Critque-Thread

@zeussy I have sent you a PM.

Upon reflection that would make it horrendously difficult to predict how posts will appear and might also break a lot of intrinsic formatting. It’s not an elegant idea and I think the current width is actually good.

I’ll definitely have a play with the user cards now. Is there a way to activate the tour of the forum and its functions? I feel like I know enough to get by but I’m sure there’s a few things more that would prove useful. Already the functionality is much smoother and more versatile than previously, it’s just different (and many of us were used to that way of things).

EDIT: images in cards work well enough with a little rejigging on PC screens. However they don’t scale well on mobile devices: my profile background picture has blown up somewhat ridiculous and I can only see like 1/40th of it!

Signatures also have the same sort of issue. The only real way around it would be to require people to have 2 images, card images, one of mobile and one for desktop/tablet.

The only thing I am aware of is the post I linked above.

…I’m sorry, but I loathe the new forum software. I didn’t even read this thread because it would mean interacting further with Discourse.

• It’s really script-y. Like, I don’t need to see a live preview of my posts. It’s actually distracting.
• I hate infinite-scroll. Hate hate hate hate. Give me a page of a predictable length that I can scroll to the part of the thread I want to see. Give me landmarks I can hold onto to know where I am in the thread.
• The only advantage I see of infinite scroll is that loading all the posts at once means I can search in the page for posts instead of using the site search … except that’s not how it works. It doesn’t load all the posts at once, and if I try to hit ctrl+f to search the page, it opens the site search instead. Stealing keypresses? Incredibly rude.
• Remember how I said that, in the paginated format, I can scroll to the part of the thread I want to see? When I try to use the browser’s scrollbar in this thread, for example, it scrolls up from 43 to 26 … and then skips to 5, because it hit the top of the loaded posts and swaps them out for posts higher on the page.
• It becomes even more aggravating trying to use on the iPhone. Mercifully, the preview pane is gone, but select-to-quote (say) is a huge pain in the keister.

I know there’s a lot of “ugh things changing grump grump grump” in my reaction, but with all this floaty Web 3.1 garbage all over the place, I’m about ready to quit before I even have a chance to get used to it.

Sorry to hear you dislike it that much. I guess you can’t please everyone, and we definitely should not try to either, because that means pleasing no one.

These are the forums we will have for the foreseeable future, apart from a bit of polish here and there. I fully expect a few people to quit, that is natural with any bigger change. It has happened with Automation and the forums are no exception. Next up for quitting: people disliking the upcoming engine designer revamp.

OH OH OH OH Killrob I want to see it!

As for discourse, I still think half the problem comes from discourse being, well, so different than what we are used to in forums. I think, none of the problems really make that much difference, I get the infinite thread one, but, the preview pane? Surely that’s the opposite of stealing clicks criticism?

I really think it’s just a matter of giving it some time. No matter what they went with, we’d still need to adjust to that. And furthermore, no system will be problem proof. For every niggle, and they are niggles, there are good things about discourse too. ( I have a niggle, can’t put in two lines of space between paragraphs).

It loads much faster, it’s therefor quicker to navigate. We have a like button which will cut down on “I agree” spam. It has a cool notification system (minus the e-mail spam by default bit). The commenting system makes it easier to re-read posts before you reply I think. I could keep going, but, I’m either probably not agreed with or preaching to the choir anyway.

I’m not saying the problems aren’t problems. I’m just saying, on balance I think it’s much better than the old forum. And we HAD to change. Were there other options that some might like more? Of course. But, we’d just be having the same conversation with just, maybe, different people on each side. What would really make me sad is people stopped talking with me and each other because of this, because, you guys are all pretty cool and this forum has become, somewhat of a highlight for me. (BLUB BLUB). So I hope we can be positive and give it time.

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Hey Killrob, you don’t want to pm the super secret totally not for public in dev not ready to be seen preview images to me do you?

You can with a HTML tag. Try using 1 or 2 <br> tags.

The one thing I have noticed with this, is if the forum sees you reacting to a notification (I also have desktop notifications in Chrome) within a certain time frame, it doesn’t email you. It only emails you if you are offline. But I do agree it can end up a bit spammy by default. I was a bit crap on engaging on the old forum (as I found it pretty terrible), and hideous to use on a phone, which is the main time device I use for social media/forums.

I really like how it looks with the colours and modern design, I just think it is a lot to get used to, I have to look really hard at the page to find what I’m looking for, simply because it looks so different.

I don’t really care about the forums as long as I can use it and the game is good. The new forum would never make me quit!

honestly i dont really mind some scrolling but for a big thread like BRC thread it would be really painful if you want to find a post. i would like if there something to mark range of post like the page system (IIRC vBulletin have hybrid infinite scroll system and page system which i very like it). post numbering is nice but wont really cover it

Is this seriously the new design for the forum? I can’t even share my thoughts because that would violate the forum rules. I used message boards since the late 90s and have never seen something like it. I thought this was just an interim solution or the site got hacked.
Anyway, good luck.

Let me guess. You don’t use Twitter, Facebook and all that other hipstercrap?
Well me neither, and i find that new forum just aweful.
But all our complaining will not achieve anything, since the decision is already made. Use hipstercrap, because it’s “in”.
I’ve already quit multiple pc related forums, because they switched to that hipsterlayout, but i’ll continue to use that forum for BRC challenges. Even though navigating in that BRC threads is now a pure nightmare, due to that “one page” design.

This is not a forum anymore, it’s a twitterfeed.

old.png1920×1200 202 KB

Look at the same posts in the new forums. We are left with NO custom information about the poster, smaller avatar, no signature - but still only see the same amount of text on the screen?
So the new layout does absolutely nothing better, AND robs us of information?
Where do you guys see an improvement here? i just cannot understand it, really!

new.png1920×1200 154 KB

Make those textboxed 200-300pix wider, and put the reply/edit/bookmark buttons on the right side of the post. And we could finally read 6 posts without scrolling like a maniac.

Edit: another thing that’s now way worse, is the unconsciously recognizion of posters.
Absurdist had a rectangular shaped white box with a chicken in it.
koolkei had a yellow chicken with no shapes around
derbayer had a round black avatar
cobaltgirl had a rectangular shaped picture of a black car and a round logo with pink text in the signature.
all of these things are things i do not have to actively look at, to recognize them
i can read the post and due to peripheral vision, i immediately know who posted it.

now? all have the same shape on their avatar. that avatar might display only a portion of their original one, and on top of that, no one has signatures.
now i have to look every single time who posted what - actively
that’s annoying! (except for zeussy, his avatar is the only one i can recognize without looking directly at it.)

I use Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis and I still think that the infinite scroll is a poor choice on a forum.

On Twitter, Facebook or any other social network, you read content and you’ll never going to look up the content again in 95% of the cases. That’s why on Facebook and Twitter it enhances the experience. Also the displayed order is pretty irrelevant on Facebook and Twitter.

Now on the other hand, on a forum you do wanna re-read and look up things again. And the infinite scroll makes it too confusing and messy. I have personal experience with infinite scroll: On a project that i worked on, the manager thought i was a cool technical and nifty feature, after two weeks everyone wanted the paging feature back.

People might say, super popular sites X and Y use infinite scroll, but think about why the google result page does not use it. On google most of time you never even visit the second result page, yet google still does not use infinite scroll.

If the decision is made, and there is no option to go enable paging, i can understand that. And, yes you’ll never please all people, but I just think from a usabilty perspective it is a poor decision for a forum.

XenForo would have been a good choice IMO. Looks modern, has advances notification features, mobile layout, fixed width content, AND a paging layout.

@Denta: There is a bookmark post button, but it was hidden behind the ‘…’ I’ve pulled it out:

You get to your bookmarks here:

Ok @mer_at, I’ll bite.

Yeap it has. This forum has a pretty great back end API that should allow for pretty cool stuff. Much easier for us to implement posting your car/engine designs straight from the game. For Long multiplayer campaigns (That happen over many months) have the game report and maintain to a thread about the game. XenForo does have an external API, but it is a plugin, not a core part of the forum itself. Therefore I can’t rely on it always being there, or keeping up with forum updates. Discourse has interesting anti-spam measures built into it’s core user design/experience. I’m not sure if XenForo is similar in that regard. I only have limited time to research options.

At @PackBat, @asdren, @mer_at, @Denta
I’m just trying to get to the crux of the problem with infinite scrolling. From all my time of working on game design, people often shout about the symptoms, but don’t really divulge the cause.

The old BRC thread has this:

I’m trying to get my head around how that is better. Did you remember that someone has a post you want to reread on Page 35? Or are you just wanting to jump straight to the end. This forum has all that:

Click on the xxx/yyy button down the bottom and go to where you want to go. No scrolling needed.

You want to keep coming back to a certain post, as it has some interesting info? Well either remember the post number (same as remembering the page number before). Or use the bookmarking feature I covered above.

If you are complaining that infinite scrolling is not pages. That’s fine. But if you are trying to make an argument for userability/navigatability, that argument fails. Lets look at some of the user flows:

Coming into a large post for the first time

PHPBB3:

1. Enter Post
2. Read post, scroll
3. When at bottom of page, click on Next
4. Back to Step 2

Discourse:

1. Enter Post
2. Read Post, scroll
3. Back to Step 2

Entering a post and Go to the end

PHPBB3:

1. Enter Post
2. Click on the tiny page number button of the last page.

Discourse:

1. Enter Post
2. Click on xx / yy, click bottom.

Wanting to remember a place of an interesting post

PHPBB3:

1. Find the Post, by reading through the forum as you do.
2. I’m not sure of your process here. Remembering the Thread Name & Page Number. Bookmarking the current URL in your browser? Or are you just scrolling and bashing through the pages in the vague area?

Discourse:

1. Find the Post, by reading through the forum as you do.
2. Bookmark it as mentioned above.

Reading a Massive thread, and wanting to resume where you left off

PHPBB3:
Not sure on this, don’t close the tab I guess. Rememebing the page number you got to?

Discourse:
Remembers where you read up to.

Searching a Topic

PHPBB3:
1a. Scroll back to top of neccessary
1b. Type search item into “Search this topic…”. Click on Search/Press Enter
2. Get Post list out of their surrounding context in Topic.
3 (Optional). Click on Jump to Post to get back to the thread.

Discourse:

1. Click on Search glass, or Ctrl+F
2. Type in your search item. Wait for results
3. Click on the result snippet, scrolls topic to the post automatically. Keeps all surrounding post contexts.

What I am trying to get at, is an objectionable reason that pages are better, rather than just a personal preference? If discourse was your first forum, and then you went back to phpbb3 or XenForo would you be ranting about pages being crap?

@zeussy: …I don’t know what to tell you. I agree very strongly with @asdren’s description (except that what on earth are you talking about, the displayed order is crucial on Twitter, everyone hates the new algorithmic timeline, have you not noticed? But aside from that, very strongly):

[quote=“asdren, post:53, topic:15631”]On Twitter, Facebook or any other social network, you read content and you’ll never going to look up the content again in 95% of the cases. That’s why on Facebook and Twitter it enhances the experience. Also the displayed order is pretty irrelevant on Facebook and Twitter.

Now on the other hand, on a forum you do wanna re-read and look up things again. And the infinite scroll makes it too confusing and messy. I have personal experience with infinite scroll: On a project that i worked on, the manager thought i was a cool technical and nifty feature, after two weeks everyone wanted the paging feature back.[/quote]
In a paginated system, the structure of flipping pages gives you a sense of where you are in the thread - one page, five pages, thirty pages, whatever - and the pagination itself keeps the size of the documents you’re reading reasonable - on the order of a few visual feet of vertical distance by my estimate.

On an infinite scroll, you look through a window at a slice of material that an algorithm completely out of your control decided you were likely to look at in the next few seconds, with posts added to the bottom (or top) whenever it thinks you’re nearing the point where you’ll read them. This slice comes from a conceptual ribbon of text that is unlimited in length. The BRC 1966 thread is probably over four hundred feet long by this point, and growing. At no point does the user interface give you anchor points to refer to, the way a pagination system automatically does - all you have is a number floating in space on a bar that shows percentage of this indeterminate length that you have reached. A percentage that changes whenever new posts are added to the end.

There’s no sense of where you are in this new system. It’s unsettling and it’s uncomfortable.

(I also hate all the floaty, scripty, animated junk. It’s freaking text - it doesn’t need to have progress bars and windows that pop up whenever you select anything.)

Edit: Holy crap, it is a pain in the keister to find a recent-but-not-new post in a thread! I was just going to the BRC 1976 thread looking for the practice results, and it’s dealer’s choice between (a) paging up and hoping you land close and (b) leaving the thread altogether to open your bookmarks to find a bookmark to skip to the thread. Where in the old forums you just clicked back to the page. (And you knew what page it was, because the post was freaking this morning.)

I thought that conversation was done already, but I should probably have paid more attention because it’s clearly a broader issue.

Note that I’m making this particular post from my mobile device. Mobile friendly layouts are probably not as important to some since Automation requires a decent PC to play, but for users like me it’s a godsend (because I’m a busy guy who works more than I play, not because I’m a hipster haha), so I’m going to be positively biased.

Regarding infinite scroll, my one objection to it was that I can’t swipe down to refresh without a lot of trouble. Then again on discourse, I don’t need to, so this point is moot.

Learning to use the bookmark feature is very handy. That’ll solve a lot of my problems in any layout. My opinion is between the page and scroll system,any sense of disorientation as packbat described cones from us having no reference point to “guess” at what vicinity a list is in.

Is this actually in important function? Hell no. It’s an artefact of the system we were accustomed to using. There is zero net effect of disorientation if you don’t know where a post is anyway. I have to cross-reference stuff I wrote in the BSLL thread which is 72 pages long in the old format and did having the page system help me there? I spent more time scrolling up and down to the page buttons than I did finding my post. Partial loading or not, that too was a royal pain in the ass, compounded by the fact not all the page numbers are displayed, so you have to use the jump to function if you want to rewind ten pages anyway. The only inconvenience is that now I can’t jump back, oh, 50 posts or 3 pages with a single click.

Big deal.

Consider that the jump to function is right there, it always updates to tell you where you are in the thread, and, on mobile devices, it floats on the bottom of the screen. That’s so much more functional and saves a lot of time. If your on PC and don’t want to read the posts from where you left off in the thread, just hit End.

I’m a longtime phpbb3 board user who doesn’t have time to read my facebook newsfeed, doesnt use twitter/reddit/ etc. Etc. and was very ambivalent about the page structure. I’d find it pretty annoying to go back.

As for @mer_at’s complaint about replacing the user info, there are a couple of pertinent points:

• forcing round swatches is a bit constraining. Is there any way at all to restore them to squares? At least they appear to support transparency.

• is it possible for us to put hyperlinks on our cards? That was one of the chief advantages of signatures.

Discourse has everything in chronical order. So it is unlike facebook/twitter that it has no algorithms to determine what you see apart from your progress through the thread. The only thing outside of this discourse does, is for you to optionally pop out replies to specific posts:

This does not resort the topic, it just ties the replies beneath the post to the post itself. Which can give a clearer understanding who is replying to who/what. Compared to having replies to posts split across pages. And therefore possibly reducing the read to quote to keep conversational context.

I do admit the color scheme on the progress bar is terrible (on posting this I edited it so you can actually see the progress now), so it’s really hard to see the progress. But it is a progress through the current topic.Here is a screenshot from a stock colour forum:

Which makes it a lot clearer where you are in a topic. Of course this is not in the same location as the scroll bar, so if you have the habit of using the scroll bar, and page number to get a bearing on where you are. Than I can see it being unsettling. Personally this gives me a really good bearing of where I am in a thread. But again this a personal preference.

I don’t mean to be an ass, but for people complaining about infinite scroll - You realise you can use ctrl + F to find a certain post in a thread, right? Obviously this isn’t possible on a mobile (not that I’m aware of…) but it’s fine for when you’re on PC.

Err… Discourse DOES load every post in a thread, so not sure what you’re on about there.

Nice try deleting your post 2fast4u

Discourse does not load every thread in its entirety, but ctrl-f does indeed search through every post. Still a page number or post number is easier to remember than a specific word/phrase in a thread.