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We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin. The default design (by Matt Grantham, great
by codinghorror 14y ago
We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin.
The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it.
And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.
- eps 14y agoI have to agree with the OP. While Discourse design looks different from vBulletin and phpBB, it's unfortunately just another variety of the same. It is busy and it's ... uhm ... giddy if you will. Why the heck does every message need a full toolbar of buttons, for example? Badges, counters - I think others are right, the gamification of SE wasn't the reason for its success. In fact, it might've pushed away more qualified posters than it actually attracted. Why not try something different, or at least make all the paraphernalia optional? Take a look at the Pivory project - that's a great take on design that doesn't stick out, but doesn't hinder the usage either. Adopt something similar as your default theme, kill the badges and you will have a discussion software that is dramatically better than vBulletin, across the board.
- bonaldi 14y agoIt's not the cosmetic problems of the phpBB design you've brought over so much as it is the fundamental problems. Take, for example, the list of threads. Just like phpBB, there are lots of columns of numbers, and stats, nearly all unnecessary. Likes? Views? Activity? Participants? The job here is to judge a thread. If a thread's good, people will post on it, and it will bump to the top. That's it. The only other things you need to know are title and size (number of posts). Even the avatars are unnecessary here: either the community is small and it'll be all the usual suspects on every thread, or the community is huge and most of the avatars will be meaningless. phpBB's deep problem is it overloads human conversation with metrics and geegaws that are there only because they were easy to code. They distract from the discourse, and I fear they'll detract from Discourse.
- jerrya 14y agoApart from all the space they waste, most implementations of avatars that use gravatar are a privacy leak, associating the MD5 of the user's email with every post on the net anywhere.
- Flenser 14y agoThey should use the MD5 of the username instead. Edit: You can change both so neither are permanent. Edit 2: Not disagreeing with you. Only mentioned that username and email can both be changed to say there's no reason not to use username for the MD5
- jerrya 14y agoYes, but you have to know it's a privacy leak, and then you have to change it. And in the meantime, WordPress and Gravatar insist it's not a privacy leak at all.
- Flenser 14y agoI find my meaningless avatars very useful. It helps to see when the someone is replying further down a thread. http://i.imgur.com/LNIXIp3.png http://i.imgur.com/LNIXIp3.png
- lobster_johnson 14y agoIs that some kind of HN userscript, or did you mock up the screenshot?
- Flenser 14y agoIt's a greasemonkey userscript running in Chromes Tampermonkey extension. It uses https://github.com/hgwr/identicon https://github.com/hgwr/identicon to generate data uri's for the avatars. I also have a hard coded map of usernames to icons. In the image above codinghorror has his own avatar as well as the stackexchange icon (I'll have to add one for discourse now). I've added many many more from icons for other users so I can remember their current and previous affiliations (which appear with 50% opacity). To make it quick to add new icons I have a bunch of bookmarklets for finding the favicon for a site, doing a flood fill of the alpha channel from the corners and resize it to 16x16 if it is a newer larger favicon. So adding a icon generally takes less the 30 seconds.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y agoHonestly, although phpBB's design leaves a hell of a lot to be desired (messy, table-based, complex, not pretty), the benefit I see from this as an open source competitor is that it's Rails and MVC. This is a sight for sore eyes for someone who has to maintain a phpBB forum and its modifications (all of which, by design, require patching the source code with some bizarre XML-diff format). Even with no formal plugin architecture, the decision to choose Rails is massively beneficial.
- martinced 14y ago+1... It's also beneficial from a security point of view. Even if Ruby had a few security exploits recently, there shall never be as many issues as there have been with PHP. I'm a huge forum users and they're regularly brought down (2+2, one of the biggest forum on the planet, was taken offline for weeks due to a PHP exploit).
- Firehed 14y agoThat's a bad code problem, not a PHP problem. Why does this meme continue to exist? This is a PHP bug: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010511-php-floating-point-bug-crashes.html http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010511-php-floating-po... Everything else? Bad code.
- jules 14y agoWhen bad code happens because the language is a security minefield, blame the language.