I know it feels that way, but this really isn’t a wumpus thing, it’s an open-source thing. Try going into the forums for any open-source software, like Kodi, and complaining that the developers’ vision for the product differs from your own. See how far you get.
Is wumpus a member of this community or not? I am under the impression he’s part of our community, and therefore not just some cold distant developer I should barely acknowledge.
On the flipside, Discourse is, presumably nowadays, his job. While there may be some sentimental attachment to us, he’ll inevitably need to do what he considers best for Discourse as a whole, not Qt3 in particular. Indeed, I suspect what he thought best for Qt3 in particular was to get us onto a platform designed precisely to his very complete and considered vision.
That might sound snippy, but I think from wumpus’s perspective, it’s genuine. There we were, floundering away with a veritable anchor around our digital necks, more or less driving a knife into the heart of one of his preferred Internet Places. How vulgar! :)
Sure sure. I am not asking him to actually make different decisions or even saying he has to make exceptions just to QT3, but it would be nice if the way he engaged the community was a little, I don’t know, more like he’s a part of it. And if he knows a change is going to come, why not just post it?
I just wish Discourse were more flexible and configurable such that you could have the cool advanced technology without being locked into wumpus’ precise vision of how forums should function. I’ve long held that tools (like forum software) should adapt to their users rather than vice versa.
That will be news to our 400+ hosted customers, who pay us money every month. For the rationale behind changes, refer to
Sorry, I guess I am not a very empathetic person.
As stated earlier, there is the possibility to customize pages like this. Open source software is constantly changing and evolving. There are experiments and adjustments over time. If you wanted a situation where nothing ever changes… this is not that. Apologies if that was not clear.
There’s a pretty big canyon between nothing changing and something changing what seems like every hour. You can certainly see the difference between those two right?
So, not unlike Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, the plan to vaporize earth was in the archive all the time - THANKS!
Anyways - to sum up :
- These changes are here to stay, whether we like them or not
- More changes will arrive, whether we like them or not.
The above is being brought on by us not being important because we aren’t one of the 400 paying costumers, and THEY like these constant changes.
Correct?
Why update at all? I don’t get why we don’t just opt out from upgrades, lock down our current version and decide if and when we plan to update and implement changes.
There should be Debian-like tracks. Qt3 could opt in for bug fixes only not cutting edge new features.
I’m sure it has been raised before, for the sake of uniformity the right hand column i.e. list of latest posts should be of the same length as the left hand column, i.e. list of categories.
I kind of like the cleaner, less clustered mobile menu.
Ideally, the layout should be customisable on the user’s end so people can change to whatever they want, the default layout will then become recommended view and no more.
+1 like
Just to expand on that. I really like Discourse, but it seems strangely absent of any design consideration regarding certain choice to adopters of the platform.
Like, why not implement the categories change as a style choice in the admin interface? User configurable styles? User blocking, disabling likes, etc, etc.
It’s like the vision is so set in stone as to be unalterable for all on the path, regardless of which stepping stone got you interested and on the path to begin with.
The design team should be asking themselves during developments if changes like these can easily be offered as an option at the expense of a small amount of additional development time, rather than a forced change.
Assuming we’re talking about the way the main page of the forum is jammed with categories on one side and a mandatory list of latest posts on the other, I don’t like it at all. It’s busy and cramped. I had no idea it was a forced display for everyone. Frankly, I assumed I had accidentally messed up some setting and I figured I could go into my options settings and fix it whenever I got the time to figure it out.
I’m going to be really bummed if part of using Discourse means we have huge aesthetic shifts like this thrust on us. I wasn’t aware that was part of the deal. And I’m surprised Discourse uses a Windows 10 style mandatory update system instead of letting communities configure the software as best fits their needs.
-Tom
Putting aside my own disappointment at losing a view I found useful. I don’t see how the new layout is in keeping with Discourse’s alleged design philosophy anyway. Most views in Discourse tend to be clean and focused. I don’t think you can say that of the categories view now, its 2 different views sandwiched together. I’d drop the latest posts entirely. Its a categories view, let that be the focus.
It doesn’t, every update came from an administrator (not me) clicking the “update now” button.
My sentiments exactly.
Stusser, I just meant mandatory in the sense of “you’re going to use this new interface whether you like it or not, dammit”. I can’t imagine, say, vBulletin forcing its users to suddenly deal with twice as much information. Redundant information ,at that!
And now that I’m looking at it without thinking “oops, I broke something, but no prob, I’ll just fix it later”, this is a mess. Why is the function of the “latest” tab piling onto the function of the “categories” tab, and yet “latest” still exists as its own thing? Why then can’t categories go back to being its own thing? I have no idea what the thinking was, but let’s please do something to get back a single clean and simple screen for categories.
-Tom
I like the new look.
Same here. Gives you both access to the categories and an overview of the latest posts. But it’s true it’s kind of redundant.
I personally spend most of my time in Unread and Latest (hence why I like the view, I guess). So I’m not personally fussed what the category page looks like.
Wendelius
It’s open source. Forking and doing our own thing (either by making or preventing changes) is always an option.
Moving this to its own topic.
Since the categories page design feedback has been mostly negative, and confirmed by @tomchick, we will look at making that rightmost column configurable in Site Settings to mimic the old category page behavior.