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I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blo

I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.

zbrozek 5y ago
Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
true_religion 5y ago
I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
- dqv 5y ago
  It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it
wavyknife 5y ago
Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community. I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
- jlokier 5y ago
  For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress. Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge. Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical. I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback. Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege. I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge. When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me. In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value. For me I think these concrete changes might help: - Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved. - Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics. - Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
dbetteridge 5y ago
- too much whitespace around text. - no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer. - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile). - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?

zbrozek 5y ago

Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.

true_religion 5y ago

I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.

dqv 5y ago
It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
- joeberon 5y ago
  Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it

wavyknife 5y ago

Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community. I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!

jlokier 5y ago
For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress. Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge. Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical. I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback. Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege. I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge. When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me. In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value. For me I think these concrete changes might help: - Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved. - Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics. - Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.

dbetteridge 5y ago

- too much whitespace around text. - no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer. - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile). - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?