7 ms·

For anyone who has to deal with the pain of reading Discourse message threads, you can append ?_escaped_fragment_ to the URI to get a JS-free page that loads co

by gue5t 9y ago

For anyone who has to deal with the pain of reading Discourse message threads, you can append ?_escaped_fragment_ to the URI to get a JS-free page that loads completely immediately and doesn't unload when you scroll. I have no idea why this user-hostile functionality is present by default. It breaks ctrl+F, ctrl+S, the scrollbar, and loads of other browser functionality.

Macha 9y ago
Yeah. It's weird given he got it so right at SE and SO was just totally better than Yahoo Answers and Experts Exchange, but as a user, I hate discourse boards and would much rather good old 00s vBulletin or phpBB
- frik 9y ago
  vBulletin 3 was the gold standard and phpBB the second best. StackOverflow has such a nice UI and UX. The UI is nice in Discourse too, but its UX needs more work. Bigger forums are hard to follow, infinite scroll comes with its own problems. The themes waste too much screen space.
  - sbierwagen 9y ago
    Recently I've spent a certain amount of time on forums trying to troubleshoot a problem on an older car, and I'm having trouble agreeing with the statement that vBulletin was any kind of gold standard. There's just so much... junk. Huge post signatures, user badges, post counts, other post metadata... It's remarkably hard to skim a thread for relevant information.
    - richardwhiuk 9y ago
      All of that stuff (post counts / signatures / badges) was part of trying to encourage it to be a community.
      - ahartman00 9y ago
        Can't figure out why you are being downvoted. Post counts: a metric for how long they have been here, also an attempt to let new members know if this person knows what they are talking about. Yes, post count is a poor metric for level of knowledge, but measuring level of knowledge is not an easy problem(see controversy over IQ tests). Displaying upvotes could be better, but see reddit where people post the same dumb jokes to farm karma, or steal jokes from other subs. Signatures: People like to express themselves. I'm not a fan of this one either, but hey. It can be useful when you see someone say something intelligent/helpful/etc, and their signature has a list of threads they started. You might find those threads filled with useful info. Badges: This encourages desirable behavior. It can also help identify those who have a high level of knowledge. I would add avatars: Have you every heard someone say they can remember faces, but not names? This is an attempt to help members identify each other. Edit: post metadata: seeing the number of upvotes on a post gives you an idea on whether it is true or not.
        CM30 9y ago
        Yeah, 100% this. For signatures, it's also (in a lot of cases) because people see the signature backlink as a 'reward' for using the community. Like "if I post content on a regular basis, you'll let me link back to my own site/social media presence in my signature". This itself causes some issues (like with spammers joining simply for the 'SEO' benefits), but it's enough of a pattern that changing it will often kill a forum dead, especially in the webmaster/tech/marketing field. Other things that encourage members (but that are often seen as clutter) include reputation systems (like the green bars vBulletin had), forum cash (points given for posts and other actions), fictional shop items (purchased with said forum cash), etc. Again, a lot of people on these forums rather like said systems and often find them useful, even if to an outsider that might be seen as overwhelming.
    - ihartley 9y ago
      A lot of that comes down to the quality and composition of the community you're looking at. The site admins have a lot of switch and levers to adjust the look and feel of a default vBulletin or phpBB install, and most communities' forums tend to end up having a similar aesthetic to the cars owned by the user base; anywhere from super bling'd out to subdued professionalism. The informational content seems to follow similar lines: some forums are populated by people who need hand holding through every step of an oil change, and others have more seasoned shade tree mechanics that just need some tips on how to do something without access to the factory tools.
- gavinpc 9y ago
  This is a case of "second system syndrome" (as I've heard it called). http://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect http://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect (C2's new design is a bit of that in itself, IMHO.)
- codinghorror 9y ago
  As I like to say, if nobody hates what you're doing, it isn't very interesting.
accountyaccount 9y ago
How is this any different from traditional pagination? My understanding is that discourse is essentially just removing the necessity to click a tiny number every time you want to view the next page.
- CM30 9y ago
  Honestly, I think I (and a lot of people here) would probably prefer the numbers to what Discourse has at the moment. At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view. On Discourse you either scroll like mad and slowly load in crap, or click the last post and slowly scroll back up. If I know something useful is on page 10... well I'm just out of luck.
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    Asking some questions because I'm legitimately curious, I'm not super familiar with Discourse... but from admin'ing some other forum platforms, their choices seem logical to me. Is the implementation just bad? >At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view Assuming you mean sequentially, isn't this the same as scrolling but with a click involved? If you don't mean sequentially, how would you know which page to click? >If I know something useful is on page 10... How do you know something useful is on page 10? Is it normal for forum users to remember specific page numbers within a post?
    - detaro 9y ago
      Reasons you might want to address page numbers: Jumping ahead helps with skimming. You might (roughly) remember where you left off last. Other threads and page numbers are referenced in other threads (yes, people could link, but they don't always do) I also like page sizes as "breaks" to follow up on links etc. Discourse's implementation of infinite scroll isn't all that bad (it keeps position properly and doesn't seem to have strange glitches, although I haven't tried it on a bad connection), and at least navigation elements are there. But they feel strange and trip me up every time: the secondary "scroll bar", or in thinner browser windows the "progress bar" at the bottom that overlays the post content and you have to click to get the scroll bar pop up. It feels like a mobile app, half-way designed for touch, not a forum.
dfabulich 9y ago
All forums with large threads have to paginate for performance, including HN. Discourse's infini-scroll feature is best understood as "automatic page turning." In a paginated thread, you can only Ctrl-F for stuff on the current page, and Discourse is no different; it's no more "broken" than a traditional paginated forum with manual page turning. Similarly, you can only Ctrl-S to save the current page, not the whole thread. Many forums have a "search in this thread" feature, and Discourse does, too. In fact, if you click in the page and press Ctrl-F, it intercepts the keystroke and shows Discourse's "search in thread" search box; some forums with manual page turning do the same thing. Some people seem to get really pissed off at automatic page turning; I kinda understand why, but there are clear arguments for automatic page turning. Why make the user click "Next Page" when the software could do it for you? You'll notice that all of the most popular feed-based sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram) use automatic page turning, too, and that's because experiments show that people engage more when automatic page turning is enabled. None of this will make you any happier with APT, but hopefully it will annoy you slightly less to know that this is a data-driven decision and not done specifically to annoy you.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  HN doesn't paginate comments any more. Here's a thread with 970 comments for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023198
  - ihuman 9y ago
    When did they make that change? A month ago or so, I remember having to click a link at the bottom of a page to load more comments.
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      Same. I think that they enable it on a case-by-case basis as load gets high. Also, the "Who's hiring?" threads do not typically spawn active subthreads, so that may make them more cacheable/easier to load.
    - 9y ago
jwong_ 9y ago
Breaking ctrl+f gets my blood boiling every time I have to use a Discourse site. I've recently started to have to use one, and searching for anything is incredibly hard. Ctrl+F will bring up their own hijacked search. But by default it searches for new topics. Ok, switch it to the current topic only for search. Great, now it just shows you the entire post, and doesn't highlight your search term. I already knew where the post was, because I scrolled down to it. I don't need to be told where it was, I need to know where the specific phrase I searched for is. I've seen complaints about it from the past, but given that 3 years has passed and it's still like that, I just give up any hope of being productive when having to use a Discourse site.
- mistermann 9y ago
  It's really surprising to see these sorts of problems in Discourse as Jeff is usually absolutely obsessed with user experience.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  simply press CTRL+F twice. Note that on small topics, CTRL+F will work as you expect as the entire topic fits on one "page"
HalfwayToDice 9y ago
Discourse was a missed open-goal. Forum software was horrible, and Discourse were a smart team at the right point-in-time. Unfortunately, they blew it. They created an over-engineered, over-complicated, bloated, heavy mess. Jeff bet on Moore's Law meaning that bandwidth/speed would eventually negate the bloat, but instead the world moved to low powered devices with mobile bandwidth. They've spent years trying to get infinite scrolling working OK and installation OK. Why? Imagine if they'd actually used all their brainpower on features that forum owners actually wanted: automated spam tools, automated admin tasks, one-click install to any hosting plan (yes using PHP if necessary). All the years of wasted talent, and now the other forum products have overtaken them on usability/maintainability. And they are STILL trying to fix the hijacked browser search feature, that you get lost in infinite scroll, and that you need to run a separate VM to run something as simple as forum software. LESSON: beware second-system-syndrome, beware the CEO who has personal tech vendetas which are misaligned with your product strategy, and beware creating a team consisting solely of talented engineers who will do one thing: OVER-ENGINEER.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  In my opinion, it is a truism in software that it takes three years to build the thing you originally set out to build. This was true of Stack Overflow, and it's also true of Discourse. We're supposed to be building software with the users, while observing them, while participating alongside. This takes a few years to get right. No plan survives contact with users, and that's as it should be.
  - debacle 9y ago
    It's also likely a truism that the things that add value and the things that make money converge into a Venn diagram, not always for the best.
- Nition 9y ago
  It's interesting to hear someone else say this because all I'd really heard before this comment thread today was good things about Discourse. I ran my own Discourse forum for a while. Users liked it well enough, but eventually I switched to using the free Steam community forums (it was a forum for a game) because it was costing me every month to run a separate server for it on Amazon. During Discourse's life it also changed recommended install methods and auto-updates would occasionally break, so it was work to maintain. To be fair a lot of this was on relatively early versions. I also found the Ctrl-F breaking and infinite scroll much more annoying than useful and tried to tell them[1] along with others. They listened somewhat and switched to only taking over Ctrl-F on long pages, but it's still not great. In fact I just tried to Ctrl-F for my post on the page I linked and got taken to my profile page instead. [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-taking-over-ctrl-f/16190/20 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-taking-over-ctrl-f/16...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by gue5t 9y ago

Macha 9y ago

Yeah. It's weird given he got it so right at SE and SO was just totally better than Yahoo Answers and Experts Exchange, but as a user, I hate discourse boards and would much rather good old 00s vBulletin or phpBB

frik 9y ago
vBulletin 3 was the gold standard and phpBB the second best. StackOverflow has such a nice UI and UX. The UI is nice in Discourse too, but its UX needs more work. Bigger forums are hard to follow, infinite scroll comes with its own problems. The themes waste too much screen space.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  Recently I've spent a certain amount of time on forums trying to troubleshoot a problem on an older car, and I'm having trouble agreeing with the statement that vBulletin was any kind of gold standard. There's just so much... junk. Huge post signatures, user badges, post counts, other post metadata... It's remarkably hard to skim a thread for relevant information.
  - richardwhiuk 9y ago
    All of that stuff (post counts / signatures / badges) was part of trying to encourage it to be a community.
    - ahartman00 9y ago
      Can't figure out why you are being downvoted. Post counts: a metric for how long they have been here, also an attempt to let new members know if this person knows what they are talking about. Yes, post count is a poor metric for level of knowledge, but measuring level of knowledge is not an easy problem(see controversy over IQ tests). Displaying upvotes could be better, but see reddit where people post the same dumb jokes to farm karma, or steal jokes from other subs. Signatures: People like to express themselves. I'm not a fan of this one either, but hey. It can be useful when you see someone say something intelligent/helpful/etc, and their signature has a list of threads they started. You might find those threads filled with useful info. Badges: This encourages desirable behavior. It can also help identify those who have a high level of knowledge. I would add avatars: Have you every heard someone say they can remember faces, but not names? This is an attempt to help members identify each other. Edit: post metadata: seeing the number of upvotes on a post gives you an idea on whether it is true or not.
      - CM30 9y ago
        Yeah, 100% this. For signatures, it's also (in a lot of cases) because people see the signature backlink as a 'reward' for using the community. Like "if I post content on a regular basis, you'll let me link back to my own site/social media presence in my signature". This itself causes some issues (like with spammers joining simply for the 'SEO' benefits), but it's enough of a pattern that changing it will often kill a forum dead, especially in the webmaster/tech/marketing field. Other things that encourage members (but that are often seen as clutter) include reputation systems (like the green bars vBulletin had), forum cash (points given for posts and other actions), fictional shop items (purchased with said forum cash), etc. Again, a lot of people on these forums rather like said systems and often find them useful, even if to an outsider that might be seen as overwhelming.
  - ihartley 9y ago
    A lot of that comes down to the quality and composition of the community you're looking at. The site admins have a lot of switch and levers to adjust the look and feel of a default vBulletin or phpBB install, and most communities' forums tend to end up having a similar aesthetic to the cars owned by the user base; anywhere from super bling'd out to subdued professionalism. The informational content seems to follow similar lines: some forums are populated by people who need hand holding through every step of an oil change, and others have more seasoned shade tree mechanics that just need some tips on how to do something without access to the factory tools.
gavinpc 9y ago
This is a case of "second system syndrome" (as I've heard it called). http://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect http://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect (C2's new design is a bit of that in itself, IMHO.)
codinghorror 9y ago
As I like to say, if nobody hates what you're doing, it isn't very interesting.

accountyaccount 9y ago

How is this any different from traditional pagination? My understanding is that discourse is essentially just removing the necessity to click a tiny number every time you want to view the next page.

CM30 9y ago
Honestly, I think I (and a lot of people here) would probably prefer the numbers to what Discourse has at the moment. At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view. On Discourse you either scroll like mad and slowly load in crap, or click the last post and slowly scroll back up. If I know something useful is on page 10... well I'm just out of luck.
- accountyaccount 9y ago
  Asking some questions because I'm legitimately curious, I'm not super familiar with Discourse... but from admin'ing some other forum platforms, their choices seem logical to me. Is the implementation just bad? >At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view Assuming you mean sequentially, isn't this the same as scrolling but with a click involved? If you don't mean sequentially, how would you know which page to click? >If I know something useful is on page 10... How do you know something useful is on page 10? Is it normal for forum users to remember specific page numbers within a post?
  - detaro 9y ago
    Reasons you might want to address page numbers: Jumping ahead helps with skimming. You might (roughly) remember where you left off last. Other threads and page numbers are referenced in other threads (yes, people could link, but they don't always do) I also like page sizes as "breaks" to follow up on links etc. Discourse's implementation of infinite scroll isn't all that bad (it keeps position properly and doesn't seem to have strange glitches, although I haven't tried it on a bad connection), and at least navigation elements are there. But they feel strange and trip me up every time: the secondary "scroll bar", or in thinner browser windows the "progress bar" at the bottom that overlays the post content and you have to click to get the scroll bar pop up. It feels like a mobile app, half-way designed for touch, not a forum.

dfabulich 9y ago

All forums with large threads have to paginate for performance, including HN. Discourse's infini-scroll feature is best understood as "automatic page turning." In a paginated thread, you can only Ctrl-F for stuff on the current page, and Discourse is no different; it's no more "broken" than a traditional paginated forum with manual page turning. Similarly, you can only Ctrl-S to save the current page, not the whole thread. Many forums have a "search in this thread" feature, and Discourse does, too. In fact, if you click in the page and press Ctrl-F, it intercepts the keystroke and shows Discourse's "search in thread" search box; some forums with manual page turning do the same thing. Some people seem to get really pissed off at automatic page turning; I kinda understand why, but there are clear arguments for automatic page turning. Why make the user click "Next Page" when the software could do it for you? You'll notice that all of the most popular feed-based sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram) use automatic page turning, too, and that's because experiments show that people engage more when automatic page turning is enabled. None of this will make you any happier with APT, but hopefully it will annoy you slightly less to know that this is a data-driven decision and not done specifically to annoy you.

mattmanser 9y ago
HN doesn't paginate comments any more. Here's a thread with 970 comments for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023198
- ihuman 9y ago
  When did they make that change? A month ago or so, I remember having to click a link at the bottom of a page to load more comments.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Same. I think that they enable it on a case-by-case basis as load gets high. Also, the "Who's hiring?" threads do not typically spawn active subthreads, so that may make them more cacheable/easier to load.
  - 9y ago

jwong_ 9y ago

Breaking ctrl+f gets my blood boiling every time I have to use a Discourse site. I've recently started to have to use one, and searching for anything is incredibly hard. Ctrl+F will bring up their own hijacked search. But by default it searches for new topics. Ok, switch it to the current topic only for search. Great, now it just shows you the entire post, and doesn't highlight your search term. I already knew where the post was, because I scrolled down to it. I don't need to be told where it was, I need to know where the specific phrase I searched for is. I've seen complaints about it from the past, but given that 3 years has passed and it's still like that, I just give up any hope of being productive when having to use a Discourse site.

mistermann 9y ago
It's really surprising to see these sorts of problems in Discourse as Jeff is usually absolutely obsessed with user experience.
codinghorror 9y ago
simply press CTRL+F twice. Note that on small topics, CTRL+F will work as you expect as the entire topic fits on one "page"

HalfwayToDice 9y ago

Discourse was a missed open-goal. Forum software was horrible, and Discourse were a smart team at the right point-in-time. Unfortunately, they blew it. They created an over-engineered, over-complicated, bloated, heavy mess. Jeff bet on Moore's Law meaning that bandwidth/speed would eventually negate the bloat, but instead the world moved to low powered devices with mobile bandwidth. They've spent years trying to get infinite scrolling working OK and installation OK. Why? Imagine if they'd actually used all their brainpower on features that forum owners actually wanted: automated spam tools, automated admin tasks, one-click install to any hosting plan (yes using PHP if necessary). All the years of wasted talent, and now the other forum products have overtaken them on usability/maintainability. And they are STILL trying to fix the hijacked browser search feature, that you get lost in infinite scroll, and that you need to run a separate VM to run something as simple as forum software. LESSON: beware second-system-syndrome, beware the CEO who has personal tech vendetas which are misaligned with your product strategy, and beware creating a team consisting solely of talented engineers who will do one thing: OVER-ENGINEER.

codinghorror 9y ago
In my opinion, it is a truism in software that it takes three years to build the thing you originally set out to build. This was true of Stack Overflow, and it's also true of Discourse. We're supposed to be building software with the users, while observing them, while participating alongside. This takes a few years to get right. No plan survives contact with users, and that's as it should be.
- debacle 9y ago
  It's also likely a truism that the things that add value and the things that make money converge into a Venn diagram, not always for the best.
Nition 9y ago
It's interesting to hear someone else say this because all I'd really heard before this comment thread today was good things about Discourse. I ran my own Discourse forum for a while. Users liked it well enough, but eventually I switched to using the free Steam community forums (it was a forum for a game) because it was costing me every month to run a separate server for it on Amazon. During Discourse's life it also changed recommended install methods and auto-updates would occasionally break, so it was work to maintain. To be fair a lot of this was on relatively early versions. I also found the Ctrl-F breaking and infinite scroll much more annoying than useful and tried to tell them[1] along with others. They listened somewhat and switched to only taking over Ctrl-F on long pages, but it's still not great. In fact I just tried to Ctrl-F for my post on the page I linked and got taken to my profile page instead. [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-taking-over-ctrl-f/16190/20 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-taking-over-ctrl-f/16...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]