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It'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 l
by bonaldi 14y ago
It'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.
- jvzr 14y agoI would be interested in seeing this turned into a true Google Chrome extension. I always seem to miss who's replying. In a sense it's great since we are treated as equals, but I sometimes miss a great reply by pg and others.
- Flenser 14y agoI hesitate to share the code for this as it could change the nature of HN if it became widespread. (It would also take more time to convert it to an extension that anyone could use than I have available right now.)
- jvzr 14y agoI understand. Both points are valid, and I wish you well on the projects you spend your time on. ;)