I would like to know how suggested topics work at the bottom of each thread. As far as I can tell, they have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the thread at hand. The only relation is that I may have started the topic or posted in the topic but they’re all old and it would be a little silly to necro them. If I’m looking at the Donald Trump thread, shouldn’t I be getting suggestions like other Donald Trump threads or the Presidential election thread or things at least somewhat related? Does the Discourse suggested topics algorithm need work? Will it get better as new threads get created?
It seems to gravitate towards threads you’re tracking and/or have posted in. After that I have no idea what the criteria are.
You will need to Dismiss All on the old migrated topics where you hold a read position first.
I agree. There are valid reasons to want to filter out posters without thinking they actively harm the forum or don’t belong. “Because I find this poster irksome” is a perfectly good one. Withholding the utility in the service of some notional (and unprovable, AFAICT) benefit is ill-considered, IMO.
Correct and this set of user prefs is advisable for several people in this topic who want to read and/or explicitly dismiss every single thing. Fair warning, it is something of an extreme, as in “I honestly want to read everything!”
Yes, and on top of that pathology, this kind of ignore is basically impossible to do perfectly. What if someone quotes them? The civilized middle ground is to refuse all notifications originating from that person, so that’s what we do.
Next, I’d like to talk to you about the value of avatars…
Man, pretty much every design decision is contrary to my interest in Discourse.
I’m really enjoying Discourse, but put me in the camp of people who used and want an ignore function. I promise not to use it as a “passive-aggressive cudgel” or to complain when I see an ignored user quoted in someone else’s post.
For those of you who haven’t seen, I put a pseudo-ignore-list user CSS jobber in the user CSS library thread.
Then, in vBulletin at least, you see the quote. Not ideal, but far preferable to seeing everything that person posts as is currently forced by Discourse. But hey, you have the power to implement it in a way that collapses ignored-user quotes as well, if only you so chose.
In a really high-activity forum I could see this as a bad thing, but Qt3 is not even close to high-activity. And it’s really not “I want to read everything!”…it’s “I want to see every new thread so I can make a decision whether I want to read it or not.” And that decision making is nothing more than looking at the title.
As a rough analogy, Discourse in it’s default settings seems to be going for more of a Facebook timeline, where it attempts to curate posts that it thinks the user wants to see, whereas vBulletin (and phpBB, etc.) take the Twitter timeline approach (the one without “Show me the best Tweets first” enabled). I can skim topic titles pretty quickly and find the ones that interest me. I’m only going to read 10-15% of the threads, but I want to make the decision myself, not have the forum limit it because I read a thread for 30 seconds versus 4 minutes, or I haven’t looked at the New page in 7 days because I was on vacation.
As much as vBulletin was a dinosaur, and as much as Discourse seems to get thread reading/posting right, I find it hard to believe that the concept of “I want to see what’s happened on the forum since my last visit at a thread level” needed to get muddied up so much. vBulletin knew when I last visited, and made it very easy to see on a single page 1) new threads, 2) old threads with new posts, and 3) threads I had posted in with new posts. And I didn’t need to hit a button to tell it “ok, I’ve seen what’s been updated”.
How long do I need to view a specific post for Discourse to figure out I have read it? A the moment I am getting the Latest and Updated pages consistantly failing to acknowledge I have caught up with a thread.
Case in point, Just read the Endless Legend thread and the last post was a two liner from Armando that took me a few seconds to read.
I just read it but Discourse still thinks it is new for me. This is happening all the time and is bugging me. I don’t recall this being a problem on the test site.
Just to check, did you
A) Refresh the Latest page (or whatever page you’re looking at)?
B) Scroll down sufficiently in the post you read to tick the little timeline counter over to the latest post? It may be that you didn’t actually register as “seeing” the bottommost post
(I only bring up the latter because when I turned off “Take my to my post when I post a post” post setting, I started giving myself a bunch of Unread notifications, because I didn’t scroll down far enough to register my own new post as “read,” despite having [presumably] read it!)
Another issue I come across is where I get linked to when opening a thread.
In this example I had unread replies. Upon opening the thread, the page renders as above, with the timeline bar at post 18. Problem is post 18 is the last post I had previously read, if I do no scrolling on the page and just read the two additional posts, then close the page, does Discourse still think I have only read to post 18? I mean, it should at least open to post 19 if my last read had been 18.
Note this is not related to my issue above, as in the last couple of days I have made a point to ensure the timeline is at the latest post before closing the tab.
Absolutely yes to both. I have made it a point to ensure the timeline bar agrees I am on the last post before closing threads specifically to test this issue.
I’ve found that if you let the blue background indicating a new post completely fade away this happens a lot less often, but still do run into phantom unreads from time to time.
Oh thank god; I thought I was just stroking out and imagining that blue flash on some page-loads.
Also:
Is it the case that you don’t see the little “replied to” icon on posts you’ve yourself made? I’ve noticed it’s missing in a few of mine, but I’m reasonably confident I clicked Reply on an individual’s post rather than the topic as a whole.
Or maybe it doesn’t show up if your post immediately follows the post you’ve replied to?
Sometimes I just want a visual indication that I directly replied to a person to show up, even if they’re right up next to each other (if that is, in fact, what’s happening). It’s like a lower-weight version of quoting!
You can change that in your preferences.
p.s. I’m on a retina screen and it drives me nuts that screenshots are double dpi.
I’ve noticed the same thing and have been wondering why as well.
Wendelius
This is probably not something that Discourse can do much about (without breaking intended behaviour) but I’m finding the back button behaviour rather frustrating. I’ll click on a suggested topic, read the new post(s), then go back expecting to be taken to a list of topics, only to find myself faced with some thread I’ve already forgotten about, wondering what I was intending to do next, and basically lose my place in my "work"flow.