I was going to post this in the Welcome to the Lounge thread, but since my Regular level disappeared, I might as well post it here.
First off, I like consistency in pretty much all aspects in my life, so I really dislike change of any sort and my initial response to it is immediate hate.
I’ll probably be composing this message over the course of a couple days, as I go away and think or test something then come back to it. So my writing style may vary and change throughout the course of this post (sometimes drastically), however, now that I’ve had a chance to play around with the new forums a bit, here’s my thoughts on it.
A few years back Rai and I exchanged PMs about the old forums, it’s problems and what I liked & disliked about them and what my opinion was on migrating to a new forum software.
I’m generally not very picky when it comes to forum usage, my general requirements for any forum are:
- That it works with minimal effort most of the time
- The ability to format & customize my posts
- Should the forum get new software, the old posts can be migrated to
the new software (I HATE forum wipes)
With the new software, my 3 requirements have been met for the most part.
So here’s my list of things I both like and dislike about the new forums.
[size=16]What I like[/size]
-
Refreshing the page
We no longer have to actually refresh the page most of the time to get updated information.
The front page still needs to be refreshed to update it, but pages like the Latest, updates in Real-Time as new posts are made, you just click 1 new or updated topic. Click to show to see the new posts. Though the bubble number of new posts next to a thread doesn’t go away unless you click a sorting option. -
Categories - Though they don’t “technically” update in Real-Time, all you have to do click one of the sorting options (I generally click Activity) and it shows the new updated information.
-
Inside threads - New posts show up in Real-Time as they’re posted, so if you’re composing a post and someone posts before you the same thing you were going to post, you can just cancel your reply and not have a double post of the same information.
-
Auto-linking
Pretty much everything I’ve tested so far gets auto-linked if you post a URL. The old forum had issues with certain ASCII in the URL ($ and % for example) so it was kind of a pain. Though I haven’t actually made actual posts to truly test it out, they do seem to work in the Preview ( which can’t be trusted on code for some things, possibly limited to IE ) as far as I can tell. -
Sharing - I both like and dislike this at the same time. It’s a nice little feature that takes certain elements and part of the text from the source URL and formats it within a quote. Very effective at completely making small short quotes obsolete. Such a simple short Q&A Tumblr posts. By the same token though, it does take up a bit of space and you have to purposefully turn it into a link to avoid a URL from Sharing. Also, not all URLs use the Sharing option, but I think that’s more about the coding from source URL than it is Discourse issue.
-
Images - I like that images now get posted with just using the URL instead of having to use code to get the forum to present the image. Though like the Sharing issue, you actually have to purposefully turn it into a link to avoid a URL from showing the image.
Resizing - I also like how it resizes the images. There’s 3 stages for really big images that are
posted: Post Size / Fit To Screen / Actual Size Very useful for wanting to see the actual size .
Auto-download - This is something I REALLY like! Instead of wasting the bandwidth of sites your
linking from, or having to upload it to a good Image Hosting Service (which are getting scarce these
days), the System downloads local copies uploading them to a virtual server, retaining the original
size as well as replacing the URLs of the images to the new URLs on the virtual server.
--Something I just noticed about these 2 sub-sets on Images however that seems a bit wonky to me. When it’s uploaded to the virtual server, if it fits within the post size parameters, it doesn’t show the hover over options nor alt titles. This in itself isn’t too big of a deal, since you can just right click it. But it’s slightly inconsistent while the old forum allowed all images to be clicked and opened into the viewing shell. Here’s where it gets a tad wonky though, local copies of big images stay within post size parameters if they are within a quote and they lose their abilities of hover over options, becoming like normal images that are actually within post size parameters, even though they actually are big images and right clicking to Properties and copy/pasting the virtual server URL into a browser shows it has retained it original size.
-
Profile Backgrounds
This is a simple feature that adds a little bit more customization to your profile. While it doesn’t really put a “true” background on your profile, it is a nice little touch that adds a bit of character to your profile beyond your avatar. Though I do dislike that it scales according to browser/screen/zoom/About Me size. That makes it rather difficult to find just the right image for using on your profile that would work the way you want it to across all platforms & sizes. For example, for mine, I actually had to create and link a PNG transparency in my About Me section to get my image “just right” for my viewing, which is probably only “just right” in IE11 at 1920x1080. It also messes with the popup information when you click on my avatar in a thread, but more on that later when I cover Signatures. -
Quoting
Not that I use multi-quoting all that often, but this is a huge improvement over copy/pasting/coding multi-quotes. Just open the Reply box, highlight something, then click "quote reply. It’s super fast and solves a huge amount of headache when multi-quoting multiple posts or breaking a single post into multi-stage quoting.
[size=16]What I dislike[/size]
-
Auto-Scroll
This is my biggest gripe in the things I truly dislike about the new Discourse software and modern web design in general. It’s extremely memory intensive when having it scroll huge threads, especially when they’re plastered with images or videos every post or other post, such as the Claim Your Bishoujo/Bishounen thread or any of the big music threads. I keep my ActiveX Filtering on at all times unless I’m watching anime, and even then, I only turn it off for the site I’m watching it on and once the video starts, I turn it on again on that site on a different page (so it doesn’t refresh the video page I just started). That use to work well on the old forum, as it blocked all videos on the forum from showing. These new forums now add a placeholder pic for the embedded video, so now I can’t even avoid that. Of course, I’m probably a slightly unique case, since I have 60+ tabs open at all times, but really, even if I didn’t and started with one tab, once you start scrolling and opening several 100 auto-scroll sections and the scrollbar thumb becomes nothing but a little sliver because the page is 8 miles long, it just turns your browser into a huge memory drain. I have never used a smart phone or any type of mobile phone that allows browsing the net, so I have no idea how it reacts to vast amounts of scrolling, but it’s a huge memory drain on PC browsers. -
Paging - What I would really love, is the ability to turn off auto-scrolling altogether. Allowing us to use the old paging system if we so choose for when we are browsing the forum.
-
Editing
This is another big issue with me. With the migration (and possibly Trust Level system as well; Leaders can edit all posts), we have lost the ability to edit really old posts. It didn’t seem like a big deal when I first noticed it, but then I realized that I go through various threads that I’ve created from time to time and fix the first post to make it more acceptable or add the missing ANN info that wasn’t present when I made the thread. This also severely hampers the ability to maintain DVD/BD lists in the Collection thread as well as the lists in the Backlog thread. -
Signatures
This is kind of a moot point with the advent of eternal auto-scrolling through threads, but it’s still something I dislike that it’s missing from actual posts. I realize that the popup when you click on a person’s avatar, is suppose to be the replacement of signatures as well as giving a quick glace of the basic information on a poster without having to go to their profile, but I’ll still miss my signature in my actual posts. That being said, going back to Profile Backgrounds section of my post, anything you put in the About Me section show up in the avatar popup. Which is understandable, but with the way the profile background scaling works, if you want a full “clean” image as your background, you really can’t put anything in your About Me section and if you don’t, it scales it down to a smaller version. So it’s kind of a Catch 22 between wanting the biggest image possible and wanting a clean image unobscured by text or other images. Hence why I chose to go the route of a transparent image and nothing else, including my signature.
[size=16]Minor Nitpicks[/size]
-
Favicon
The favicon in IE11 when inside a thread is a bit inconsistent. It works when you open a thread in a new tab initially, but as you scroll up from that last post, it disappears, sometimes showing back up when you hit an auto-load spot on the page and sometimes not showing back up until you scroll all the way back down to where the last post is and sometimes not showing back up at all, no matter what you do.
One of these tabs is the https://meta.discourse.org site, so it’s probably Discourse itself and how IE11 deals with the software. -
Acreage
This has been brought up by others and @spazzysam has already posted it was put on the list of change requests, but I wanted to echo this sentiment. There is a huge amount of white on the new forum, both in the empty space to the sides as well as forum parameters specific, including inside threads and profiles (minus the profile background image we’re allowed).
There’s probably a few other things I’m forgetting to add, but as the moment, I’m on the far side of insomnia induced brain fry, so I’ll just post this “as is” and if I come across or think of anything else, make a secondary post.