In the interests of not being a complete negative nelly about the whole thing, here are some things I’ve noticed since the transition that I think are neat:
The edit/reply/topic creation window floats so you can move into entirely different threads or pages if you want while designing your post.
It automatically tries to identify similar posts so you don’t have to be nearly as paranoid about accidentally creating duplicate topics. (I haven’t actually had it identify a duplicate yet, but hey. It seems like it would have a decent chance if one were out there.
It delineates significant time gaps between replies so they’re immediately noticeable. (And apparently asks if you want to necro really old posts.)
The ease of tracking and untracking posts (or even muting them) is nice.
Superb mobile interface. Everything feel so snappy.
I love that Hamburger menu for quick navigation.
Ease of quoting - a big plus for sure.
Uploading photos, even in mobile.
Easy to copy and link a post.
Gotta say, one of the cool things about Discourse is the fact that one of the founders is right here and has a soft spot for QT3! I am hoping that means he will be influenced by the discussion here and a few of the gaps in functionality can be addressed, even if they are a result of differences in design methodology. Options don’t have to be a bad thing.
Notice how many times editable topic titles is cited here as a plus @tomchick ;)
We find most people really want good topic titles because of the Charlie Brown and Lucy “mystery football” click factor – and will help garden and prune the forum with recategorizing and re-title-ing topics to keep things tidy.
Exactly. My feeling is that when you start a discussion and other people jump into the discussion, you no longer have exclusive control over the name of the discussion. That is set when people jump in. And it should be set because the people using the thread will look for that name when they want to return. You should no more change the name of a thread than you would change the address on your house after hosting a weekly book club meeting. Once you invite other people, once the thing becomes a collaborative endeavor, you should relinquish control. Otherwise, this sort of thing is liable to happen:
For instance, I shouldn’t be able to change the name of Quarter to Three to Racists United For David Duke. I would never do that and I’m sure you guys trust me to never do that. But when you’re dealing with a larger group, when certain tools are useful to prevent certain behaviors, you want to implement rules. So I’d love the option to have a rule where you can edit your post all you want – we have that setting currently enabled – but you don’t get to change the specific signifier for the overall activity. And, yes, I think it’s really funny when people screw up and put typos in their titles. Me included. In the past, I’ve changed it for people who’ve been genuinely bothered by an error, but for the most part, people live with their errors in good humor.
So, yeah, that’s why vBulletin has a setting where you can’t change a discussion title once other people have joined. I hope at some point in the future Discourse includes this option. Because isn’t that what Discourse wants to do? Give users options? :)
ObCoolStuffDiscourseAboutDiscourse: It’s just so, so, I dunno, snappy. Smooth. And as I’m getting used to it, I’m loving how fluid it is to use Markdown code.
This strikes me a bit as the “but child molesters!” argument. The fact is that in practice we have virtually never seen any problem with actual title edits across hundreds of Discourse instances.
So with all due respect, like Festivus, I find your beliefs fascinating – but I have a lot of cold, hard scientific data that tells me otherwise.
Okay, but you’re seeing one now. And I’m still mystified why you want fewer options rather than more options. I mean, really, Discourse is already halfway there. Why does Discourse include the option to prevent users from editing posts after a certain period? If the software feels it’s important to limit that, why does it treat the subject header differently?
A user’s post belongs to him. A thread title belongs to everyone who participates and not just one person.
My analogies stand. I don’t announce a meeting and then change the address of the meeting randomly. I don’t hang out a shingle to advertise a town meeting and then swap it out for a different sign half way through the meeting. And if you need a data point, here’s one:
That thread used to have a different title. The guy who started the thread four years ago took it upon himself to change the title. So when I saw the new titles, I thought, “oh, cool, a new discussion about this game”. I clicked on it and discovered no such thing.
Furthermore, any external links to that thread are now broken because changing the title also changes the URL of thread. What if I’d linked to that thread from the front page, which has happened with numerous threads? What if someone linked it from an article that was maybe bringing us traffic? What if it was part of a wiki somewhere? I’d think you would understand the significance of that. You’re granting one participant in a discussion exclusive power to sever connections to the rest of the internet.
So there you go. You can now no long say you have virtually never seen any problem with this missing feature. I hereby give you one. There’s a reason it’s a feature in other software. I hope Discourse comes to understand the value in offering it as an option.
The external links will continue to work. The title is in the URL just for search engine optimization purposes, but is otherwise ignored. The actual thread is identified by the id number at the end, which is not affected by title changes.
There will also be a disconnect when comparing to the Qt3 Archives if there’s a rampant change in forum title. On the other hand, there might not be a need to visit the archives.
Awe man I apparently broke stuff, I didn’t mean to. :(
Reasons why I changed it after so long…
I came to really love the game when I did get to play it.
I felt a sense of shame at the indifferent and slightly down putting title I had created so long ago, and HATED seeing the thread bumped.
Tom recently mentioned this as his number 1 zombie game, and I wanted to express that in the title.
Sorry if I messed up links to it from other places. Should I change it back?
Try changing the title of a Discourse topic, then visiting the old link. In fact, edit the URL and replace the whole title with random letters. Go on. I dare you. I triple dog dare you!
It’d be a shame if you based your entire decision making process for an onerous policy – note I have counted three unsolicited user opinions here citing topic renamed as something they celebrated, with zero prompting – on badly written software.
