Suggestions for future improvements to our forum software

Right, that was my original misunderstanding (see my previous comment about this above). So I now have the problem of having inadvertantly subscribed to a bunch of threads that I don’t need email subscriptions to. It sounds like I’m just going to have to visit and change the setting in each thread individually, which is kind of a pain but I guess not a huge deal.

I’m sorry if I’m being incredibly dense here - but is there a way to reply-quote someone? Or do you have to manually paste the quotes in?

Highlight the text you want to quote. There will be a QUOTE button above the text.

Beautiful - thanks!

There’s also a button in the toolbar at the top of the reply window (first one on the left) that you can tap to fully quote the post you’re replying to.

So there is! Cool.

Hey, neat!, Does that work on mobile? It’s a real pain to drag-select on mobile.

Yes on the iPhone …

I would avoid full-quoting unless you really need to, since it adds a lot of clutter and repeated text. It’s better to simply smash the reply button on the particular post you want to reply to, or if replying to a few different posts at once use @name mentions as needed.

When posting a link to an article, how do you get the article preview to show up? I’m on the default theme, I think.

If it’s on its own line, not turned into text (e.g., don’t do this), and the website in question supports the One-Boxing standards that Discourse implements, it’ll happen automagically. Most modern/major websites will support said standards. Older content will be less likely to.

Like this:

This is how it looked when I wrote the above:

image

Edit: Or, what Armando said.

Thanks - figured it out.

And PS - Smokey and the Bandit is great!

Damn movie succeeded as a car advertisement anyway. My first Trans Am was a '77 Bandit Edition, bought shortly after I saw the film in the theater. Bought a few more after that too. They were great cars, provided you could either find a well-kept used one, or afford a new one. Finding a good used one, even back in the day, was damn difficult. Most people were hard on them.

Here’s something that tripped me up several times until I realized what was happening. I don’t know if there’s a solution for it (or if it’s even a problem), but I figure it’s worth bringing up.

So let’s say I make post 100 in a topic. A few people reply to the topic (but not me specifically) and then one person @mentions me in post 105. I get the notification and click on it, which takes me to post 105. But there’s no indication that I missed posts 101-104, and since Discourse “sees” that I made it to post 105, it assumes I’ve read everything before that – there’s no unread number next to the topic, and it doesn’t show up in Unread.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter, but I just noticed that someone else was tripped up by it in a different thread.

Anything I can do to keep track of stuff like that, other than scrolling up every time I’m mentioned to make sure I didn’t miss anything? It’s fine if that’s the solution, I just figured I’d bring it up. Thanks!

Yeah, I completely lost my place in the Black Panther thread (which I was pointedly not reading past release-day posts until I saw the movie) because SOME PEOPLE kept tagging me in the latter discussion throughout it :( :( :(

How do you and @ArmandoPenblade envision this working in terms of the UI? Showing all the “holes” in the topic where you didn’t read?

TBH, that would be pretty great, though I realize it’s a real challenge to implement and probably increases “last-read location” data by an order of magnitude server-side.

Maybe some kind of post-peep function (like how you can hover to view a preview of a post, page, or profile link on FB to get a simplified view of it) that doesn’t trigger a change of “last-read” placement?

Armando’s suggestion is probably the cleanest, UI-wise. Maybe hovering over the notification would bring up some kind of panel that shows the necessary text (either the post containing the @mention or my post + the reply post). Maybe clicking on it would display that instead of taking you to the topic.

If Discourse can detect that there are holes in the topic, maybe anytime it sees that there are unread posts above me, display some kind of unobtrusive, dismissable indicator of that? Here’s an example I found:

image

But then I guess you have to deal with questions like, if someone starts at the beginning of a topic and skips to the end via the topic navigator, should that count the in-between posts as unread? Or, does dismissing the indicator dismiss it forever, or only until the next time Discourse senses a hole? Is that something that gets added to preferences? Software’s complicated, man.

wumpus can (please do!) correct me if my intuition is off here, but I’d expect that data to be something like a sparse array right now (per user) which contains the last-read-post ID for each thread the person has viewed where a missing entry implies unread. The change you’re looking for would add a variable length bitmap with each bit being a read indicator for individual posts. While yes, that increases the storage requirements for the indicators (on average I’d guess by about 4x), that data is already minuscule compared to the size of the post contents themselves, and more importantly it scales linearly with the number of posts in the thread. If you wanted to compact things, can always clear out the bitset entirely any time all of the bits for the posts up to and including the last-read-ID are the same.

tl;dr: there would be some UX challenges, but I wouldn’t worry about the storage cost for the data.