Discourse sucks!

Welcome & Info Introductions, Rules & Feedback
1
  1. It is more a WhatsApp group rather than a forum which can be used for serious discussion.
  2. So much whitespace which takes up screen real estate.
  3. So difficult to navigate.

Can anyone tell me why it doesn’t suck? Or, if there are any benefits of this compared to the previous forum software. Almost the whole world has moved to discourse for forums. I can’t seem to understand why. It is a nightmare to navigate.

Fire away with your grievances. I know it is not going to change anything but I don’t like the direction in which tech is going making things much worse than what it used to be. No benefit (downright bad rather) and making change for the sake of change.

37 Likes
2

It is well known that Discourse has very poor user experience and it is not as much a priority for them to fix it, compared to working on the technical aspects.

It is proliferating on the basis of being modern, if nothing else. It doesn’t really lend itself well to long form discussion, but that’s the world we are in now.

10 Likes
3

Question on reddit: “Is there a better forum than Discourse?”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1jbwbkx/is_there_a_better_forum_than_discourse/

First answer: “Every single one of them is better than discourse.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1jbwbkx/comment/mhxblmo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

13 Likes
4

I miss the old forum UI so much. My techenclave usage has dropped considerably ever since the migration.

38 Likes
5

My sentiment is with you brother. I’m trying too hard to like this interface but nope, it didn’t clicked with me.

8 Likes
6

It’s modern and sleek. Compared to our previous version, it’s not worse. And mods were still implementing some features and squashing bugs. A few things to add would be a side panel for who is online now, and some UI enhancements

2 Likes
7

I am in the minority, I love discourse, apart from few bugs here and there.

Love the notification system new + unread + actual notifications. The minimalist design.

The reply composer with live preview, and the markdown support, which gives us things like image resize while posting.

The featured topics that I can have on my profile.

It will only get better as renegade tweaks things.

Navigating around has steep learning curve. Once I understood how the layout is glued, it made it easier for me.

I don’t miss xenforo.

7 Likes
8

I miss the old Xenforo but we need to have some interaction with the tech world so we need to upgrade.

1 Like
9

IMO it’s not that bad

no easy way to move to something modern, would’ve taken way too much work

10

@puns @renegade This has been moved to Introduction, Rules and Feedback. I was talking about Discourse in general not necessarily specific to Techenclave. Although, I am devastated about it being used here. But, I think this topic belongs in the Tech section.

An example of useless white space: This is on a 1440p screen. There are only about 50-60 words of useful stuff on this page.

image
image1221×1923 313 KB

3 Likes
11

I think Discourse is more for tinkerers with many options to fine tune but I would go with Xenforo for its simplicity and better UI. Agree with @AverageSkyrimEnjoyer my usage has dropped considerably too

6 Likes
12

White space is something that can be fixed with a redesigned theme and I am with you on that.

As for the width of the page. This is what they had to say.

WCAG recommends keeping lines at 80 characters or below for non-CJK text. Our designs try to take this into account; Horizon is currently at ~76.

1 Like
13

I got used to it fairly quickly. @Renegade One suggestion I would have is make the colours of the subforums be the same as the older website. That will aid in the transition.

For example User-to-user listings tag used to be Green and now is red.

2 Likes
14

@Renegade is there any way that in a thread can visit latest post wihtout keep scrolling & loading huge single page to read latest post?

By loading huge dicussion thread I think considerable part of users data also exhaust.

Also every one loading full page so may be uncessary maximum load on forun server bandwidth too, isn’t it?

16

Full single page is never loaded all at once, if you click here you will reach the end, skipping everything.

image
image209×506 2.71 KB

Now as you scroll upwards data begins to load in, it is loaded in sections. Very efficient.

If you use the browser scroll bar to scroll down, then all the page data will be loaded.

4 Likes
17

Is there was an option to have the posts sorted by descending order ?

2 Likes
18

It has been significantly difficult for me to adapt from the old UI, so many things I haven’t figured out yet, and dont bother looking at a guide, to read a forum

19

I’m using Stylebot Chrome Extension with the following CSS for full width

:root {
    --d-max-width: 1900px;
    --topic-body-width: 1244px;
}

This made TE a bit more readable for me

20

Admins : “What’s done is done. Give it time you will like it.”

3 Likes
21

If you mean sorting the posts within the topic/thread, then there is no way to show them in reverse order like latest one being first, that will always be oldest one shown first.

This shouldn’t be an issue for anyone because when you open any topic/thread it will always take you the latest unread or latest post.

If you mean sorting the topics/threads in category or sub-category then yes there are ways to change the order by the latest one created first.