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What annoys me most about Discourse are the following things: No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an i

What annoys me most about Discourse are the following things: No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an indication can be seen, that JS is required and it is waaay off of anything having a non JS fallback. The above also means, that any knowledge in there will not be found via search engines. I have had it happen, that there was a forum of some community, and I did not even know it existed, even though I searched loads of stuff about the project. It simply never appeared in any search result ever. It is not discoverable. Aside from not being discoverable, I find that any traditional forum software works better than discourse. For example I cannot properly see when exactly a reply was written, because it abstacts from a simple timestamp and shows only a month and year for example.

lf-non 5y ago
> I find that any traditional forum software works better than discourse. For example I cannot properly see when exactly a reply was written, because it abstacts from a simple timestamp and shows only a month and year for example. Yes, I agree. I like the FluxBB based forum that Arch community uses and find the look & feel a good balance between excessive use of whitespace and overly cramped UIs. > No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an indication can be seen, that JS is required and it is waaay off of anything having a non JS fallback. I am not sure if this is configurable but the official kotlin forum [1] uses discourse and I can see the content when js is disabled. A lot of interactivity is disabled but the footer does have a clear message that the site is best viewed with js enabled. I have often found kotlin forum posts through google search, so there doesn't seem to be any issue on the SEO front. [1] https://discuss.kotlinlang.org https://discuss.kotlinlang.org
codinghorror 5y ago
You are thinking of Nim with the white page; Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it! And of course everything is searchable. We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google. As for the timestamp, click or hover over the timestamp to see the full date/time, etc.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Don't take this the wrong way: Being indexed by Google does not add anything for me personally, as I am not using Google. If there is a forum, which can only currently be indexed by Google, then I might even see that as harmful to the web in general, as it adds incentive to users to use Google, instead of other search engines. I have experienced it multiple times, that stuff is only in some discourse forum and I see a blank white page. Basically a JS-wall. Not sure, if the people, who hosted it did something weird to cause that issue, but that is the impression I have of discourse forums. Rarely I allow its scripts to run and make the effort to view some content in any such forum. Usually I just close the tab. Edit: Now I know why I might have had that experience: I also block loads of third party CDNs. Perhaps they were trying to load scripts and resources from there and that's why nothing was shown. Edit2: But you are also correct: The Nim one does not show anything without JS.
- a5aAqU 5y ago
  Discourse often shows a blank page with certain ad-blockers. JS is enabled, but the Discourse CDN gets blocked, so nothing displays unless the ad-blocking setting is overridden for that site. Some sites do load HTML, but others are blank.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google. Google's crawler can index JS-only content just fine: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang.org https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang....
- stonewareslord 5y ago
  With javascript disabled on mobile, you just get a header with links that don't work and "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" even on the official https://try.discourse.org/ https://try.discourse.org/ site What I don't understand is why discourse can't serve up content that isn't interactive. I get lazy loading if there are >1000 comments on a post, but for anything else, static content should be perfectly fine. Even when you have js on, ctrlf doesn't work because of dynamic loading so the site has to hijack the shortcut with different interaction patterns (pressing enter doesn't go to next result, it loads a separate page). I just tested with the 999 comment post on that site. First page load with no cache is 5.98MB (1.25MB) and took 5.76s load time. Holding the end key to get to the bottom until I hit the last post downloads a total of 1.91MB (718KB transfer) and takes 70s! That's including all the pictures. That cannot be better than than loading all text and optionally deferring all img loads, right?

lf-non 5y ago

> I find that any traditional forum software works better than discourse. For example I cannot properly see when exactly a reply was written, because it abstacts from a simple timestamp and shows only a month and year for example. Yes, I agree. I like the FluxBB based forum that Arch community uses and find the look & feel a good balance between excessive use of whitespace and overly cramped UIs. > No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an indication can be seen, that JS is required and it is waaay off of anything having a non JS fallback. I am not sure if this is configurable but the official kotlin forum [1] uses discourse and I can see the content when js is disabled. A lot of interactivity is disabled but the footer does have a clear message that the site is best viewed with js enabled. I have often found kotlin forum posts through google search, so there doesn't seem to be any issue on the SEO front. [1] https://discuss.kotlinlang.org https://discuss.kotlinlang.org

codinghorror 5y ago

You are thinking of Nim with the white page; Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it! And of course everything is searchable. We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google. As for the timestamp, click or hover over the timestamp to see the full date/time, etc.

zelphirkalt 5y ago
Don't take this the wrong way: Being indexed by Google does not add anything for me personally, as I am not using Google. If there is a forum, which can only currently be indexed by Google, then I might even see that as harmful to the web in general, as it adds incentive to users to use Google, instead of other search engines. I have experienced it multiple times, that stuff is only in some discourse forum and I see a blank white page. Basically a JS-wall. Not sure, if the people, who hosted it did something weird to cause that issue, but that is the impression I have of discourse forums. Rarely I allow its scripts to run and make the effort to view some content in any such forum. Usually I just close the tab. Edit: Now I know why I might have had that experience: I also block loads of third party CDNs. Perhaps they were trying to load scripts and resources from there and that's why nothing was shown. Edit2: But you are also correct: The Nim one does not show anything without JS.
a5aAqU 5y ago
Discourse often shows a blank page with certain ad-blockers. JS is enabled, but the Discourse CDN gets blocked, so nothing displays unless the ad-blocking setting is overridden for that site. Some sites do load HTML, but others are blank.
duskwuff 5y ago
> We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google. Google's crawler can index JS-only content just fine: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang.org https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang....
stonewareslord 5y ago
With javascript disabled on mobile, you just get a header with links that don't work and "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" even on the official https://try.discourse.org/ https://try.discourse.org/ site What I don't understand is why discourse can't serve up content that isn't interactive. I get lazy loading if there are >1000 comments on a post, but for anything else, static content should be perfectly fine. Even when you have js on, ctrlf doesn't work because of dynamic loading so the site has to hijack the shortcut with different interaction patterns (pressing enter doesn't go to next result, it loads a separate page). I just tested with the 999 comment post on that site. First page load with no cache is 5.98MB (1.25MB) and took 5.76s load time. Holding the end key to get to the bottom until I hit the last post downloads a total of 1.91MB (718KB transfer) and takes 70s! That's including all the pictures. That cannot be better than than loading all text and optionally deferring all img loads, right?