CSS Tweaks and Fixes

Only staff can see deleted replies so that isn’t urgent. But the other bit, the topic state messages, would be in the media queries that selectively set stuff wider based on screen size.

Yeah, I played with it a bit at the test site and will put something in place once I’m sure it’s not messing up other things.

This could use some fixing too

Can we make the dividing line between posts a little thicker, like it is in the old forums? I realize we can’t put the date and post number and time of posting in it like in the old forum, but maybe we could have it close to the same thickness?

Waste of space, IMO. I like it thin.

  • Thin
  • Thick
  • Poopypants

0 voters

Created a simple black&white Qt3 style here. Requires Stylish FF add-on or Chrome plugin. (Cross-posted in the “Migration…” thread).

Wow. That’s high-contrast.

Agreed, it’s just a start, but I hope it’s a decent one.

So, this is the edge-casiest of edge-casey use-cases, buuuuut I figure it can’t hurt to ask.

For older posts (e.g., >1 mo, or whatever the “genericized date format” cutoff is), is there any way to tweak the CSS to display the fulldate/time by default, instead of on hover?

Every so often, I like to read along to a TV show’s thread on Qt3 as I binge it (most recently with Supernatural), and being able to stop myself from spoiling an ep I’m about to watch by not reading any posts after, say, AIRDATE - 7:59PM EST was handy.

Not at all game-breaking or anything, but if there’s no strong technical reason to not show the full date/timestamp as we used to do, and if other people wouldn’t mind seeing it. . .

Nice job on the cleaned up main front page view that’s just shown up. Not quite sure how to describe it, but having the main topic titles on the left and then summary of top few threads in those topics on the right, instead of the main topic titles followed by lists of top threads immediately below them makes for a much cleaner more compact view.

Bonus points because not only is it more functional from my point of view (of what I’d want on the front forum page), but it’s also much more attractive.

So big kudos to Clay or whoever came up with it. Nice work.

Okay, I just discovered that the “new view” I was just praising is actually the Standard Desktop View and the old one I didn’t like is the Standard Mobile View.

Hmm, I’m conflicted on whether to use Mobile View or Desktop View now.

Anyway, nice job designing the Desktop View’s front page. The Mobile View seems a bit wordy, but maybe it’s more functional on cell phones (I’m on a tablet).

Other thing-thought:

The current side timeline-scrollbar only takes up like half the screen. This makes navigating extremely post-dense threads a little fiddly (ah, I see, a single pixel of mouse-movement is 40 posts!). Is there any way to dynamically lengthen this bar for higher-resolution devices to make these threads a little easier to finely navigate?

(Yes, I’m aware of the ability to manually go to a certain post, but that’s more clicks and I’m being whiney now when the gettin’s good on CSS tweaks ;))

While on a roll here:

Any way to list the thread-starter on the main thread-view of a category? Or, for that matter, last-poster’s name, rather than avatar?

I get that this stuff is “Discourse style” or whatever, but the information density is a lot lower than I prefer :(

Press the link button to see the literal date. On older topics it switches from relative time to absolute time.

Also, @tomchick asked that only the last poster be shown, I tend to agree showing both first and last would be better. Discourse shows up to 5 avatars there by default: first poster, three most frequent posters (ordered by their last post) and then last poster.

Yes, I know the information is there. . . it’s just a little more obnoxious to get to than it used to be (unless you’re saying there’s a single “toggle” that will permanently show full timestamps in a thread for each post?).

Well, yes, Tom asked that we not have a thick column of avatars gouging a chunk out of the topic list, and I agree with him on that. I’m wondering if Discourse is able to put the posters’ names (both first and most recent) anywhere in that topic view. I mean, keep the single avatar if we must, but text is good! Beautiful, even! :)

Yeah, last poster is conceivably useful information (as is first poster), but avatars don’t actually convey that information to me. Maybe eventually for a few people that post a lot and have distinctive avatars, but I assume given the broadly avatar-averse tone of the old forum many people won’t bother to set one and plenty of people lurk for months on end. Or years.

In the test forum I posted this. The last poster avatar is shown in a dedicated column, just like how it is now. But the thread title is followed by a text “started by so and so” which is what we are looking for.

Copy & paste from test forum:

I just stumbled upon this article by Sam from Discourse team who designs a minimalist topic list. Might worth a look as well.

Here is a list of things I did

Remove Views
Remove Star
Get rid of avatar images use names instead
De-emphasize categories
Use more “traditional color” for topic link
Use replies instead of posts

I doubt this is news to you but the mobile version doesn’t have the gradient that the desktop version has on the topic view. Also the “Dismiss all” button for Unread seems to be missing.

It’s there:

Just that you probably need to scroll all the way to the end, which is painful!

Regarding the gradient – there are some aspects of the CSS that seem to affect desktop and mobile and others that only affect one or the other. I must not have noticed that the gradient is one of those that only affects the desktop. I’ll take a look at it later.