Suggestions for future improvements to our forum software

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Now that…

  • we’ve crossed every item off our migration wishlist

  • everyone has more or less adjusted to the new new thing

  • we’ve been living together in this community for almost a year

… let’s continue to brainstorm ideas on how can we continue to improve the forum software that powers qt3.

For an idea of what is already scheduled, you can view the general Discourse roadmap at

https://meta.discourse.org/c/releases

Please share ideas based on your experience here on the forums to date! What would make your life easier? What would be cool? What would be useful? What rough edges can we continue to polish away?

The more specific the better, and please provide concrete examples of how it would work, even a quick and dirty MS Paint mockup if you have the inclination.

2

I would appreciate it if Discourse were less condescending towards me. Also, let me write in ALL CAPS.

3
  1. Introduce a real ignore function that collapses any posts from ignored users, similar to the Details style of spoiler function.
  2. Turn off likes.
  3. ALL CAPS PLEASE.

…but mostly the first one.

4

There is a site setting if the site owner wants to explicitly allow all caps. It is possible no matter what just by adding the invisible Unicode char of your choice. Or an invisible HTML element, etc. With great power comes great responsibility, etc.

5

Better user muting options based on time (today, week, month) and/or locality (in this topic, in this category) are definitely on our radar.

6

THANKS, LOOKS LIKE IT WORKS PRETTY WELL.

7

Actual ignore, though? Because muting someone so far just means they don’t get to increment your little notification number, which is better than nothing, I guess, but not remotely sufficient.

8

Bigger font in mobile please :)
That’s quality of life changes, there.

9

I am gonna fuckin blow your mind with this innovation, @wumpus. It’s hot off the presses, quite literally:

10

Mute directly from the latest topic list. Make it happen.

A hush button in lieu of mute to make threads go away for two weeks. Sometimes nerds really get going on something stupid for a few days but I hate to mute the thread forever and miss news years from now. I guess I should just periodically unmute all.

11

Give us the ability to see or hide things like avatars, the like counter, etc. It’s usually better to have choices.

Really, though, Qt3 seems fine. It also seemed fine under the old forum software.

12

I would like to get rid of the 5 character limit. Since like is so favored, clearly it should be four, and STFU is also only 4 characters long.

13

Really, is any post shorter than “Shitbonerz” really a post at all?

14

This is a very good point: we should offer timers on topic mutes as well, for the same reason we would offer timers on user mutes. A topic mute already has locality (to the topic) of course.

15

Technically this is already possible (as well as larger font) with the user themes. You would need n+1 themes to be created, though, that is

  • dark
  • dark large font
  • dark no avatars
  • dark large font no avatars

etc

The elements of the themes are composable (you were right about that @sam) so it is not a technical problem but it does create a lot of entries in the user preferences theme list for users to puzzle over, as the number of possible combinations… well, combine.

16

Ooh, I agree on the minimum character limit. I think qt3 is a forum where you dont need to worry about that kind of abuse. Can anyone make an account now or does account creation still require Tom’s approval?

17

This is likely not the right thread to ask this, but can I get the ELI5 version of the notification bubbles on a post?

I visit a forum. I read a few topics. I return later. Some topics happily show me that I have ‘X’ new responses in said topic (good!). Some topics are shaded to show no new posts (good!). Some topics are unshaded, have new replies, but I don’t get a shiny number (confused!).

Note that I only browse in “Latest” mode. I’m not sure why this is confusing for me, so I’m clearly missing something painfully obvious. Which might turn into a suggestion once I know what to suggest for us stupid people.

18

Visit your user prefs to adjust. Normally you will only track topics that you

  • read for 4 or more minutes
  • reply to

but you can change this so every topic you enter is tracked the second you enter it, for example.

You can of course change the notification state for any topic manually, via the notification control in the right gutter or at the bottom of the topic. On mobile expand the progress bar at bottom for same.

19

Thanks sir. I knew it would be something painfully obvious. I have no suggestion here because it was my own fault for not perusing the options enough.

20

Longer term I am thinking of possibly allowing for user selectable theme components, then you would pick theme followed by components each on a line by itself on the user page

Theme
[ dark ]

[ ] large fonts
[ ] no avatars
[ ] a wonderful hat for Sam

It is not doable for the upcoming release though