Am I the only who finds this new layout unusable. A couple of examples -
Can’t understand the difference between user to user listing and classified.
Can’t find the category filter if I want to search for just laptops.
Am I too old and this UI is focussed on the younger folks, in which case it’s fine, I’ll try to learn. But really just want to know if I am the only one struggling since this UI came into being.
I have bought more stuff from Olx in the past 6 months because I just cannot use this website anymore.
Maybe I have posted in the wrong section. Because again, I couldn’t find the correct one.
Welcome to the “We Hate the New UI But Can’t Do Anything About It” club.
Most of us have already held a small,sad funeral for the old interface. It served us well all these years, then quietly passed on to the Great Afterlife of Abandoned Software. May it rest in peace.
Meanwhile, we are all stuck here trying to make sense of the new Discourse layout like confused grandparents trying to set the clock on a VCR. Some people are bravely adapting, others are still staring at their screens hoping the old ui will magically respawn one day.
Anyway, grab a seat. Misery, confusion, and nostalgia are all welcome here.
Obviously your platform your rules. And this platform is free so I don’t want to whine endlessly over something that is offered to me for free.
A few points still because it’s still a well managed platform so it would be great if it could become usable again-
If user to user listing is closed, then why not just actually migrate the posts to classified section and remove user to user section altogether. Why give it prominent visibility in the trading section. Bare minimum, at least put this message there that - Don’t use this section it is dead.
If you have a section called classifieds then the user will go there, especially since it was there earlier too, then why not have the filter there as well. How is a non-psychic supposed to know that the filter is not here but it’s there in the market section.
I am actually very curious to know if you guys have been monitoring views and depth metrics since the layout change. Either it’s growing and I have no clue about a good layout. Or no one is bothering to monitor the usage metrics.
But yes, more visibility for the message would help.
I suspect this is much harder to do, because a lot of the market features have been custom made, written from scratch for the Discourse platform, so all its core functionality is in the market section, including the filter for the custom categories.
The classifieds section is what binds the market section to the forum.
The new market is in beta, so we are in the transitioning phase, so that why few things are little out of place, but the market is fully functional including the rating system.
Unfortunately we are in the age where it is hip to put as much content to your face as possible while hiding much of the controls under multiple taps and clicks.
Basically came to the conclusion that it is pointless to try to put any original content over here as it will get quickly buried and cannot be found easily with a horrible search engine.
Better to just accept for what it is and reduce the time spent with this interface.
Discourse is easier to maintain and find developers for
The people taking these decisions are a part of a younger demographic for who different things are obvious. For example, its not obvious to me that ‘read-only’ means that the thread is closed. I just thought I dont have the user privilege to post, thats why it shows ‘read-only’. But I am sure it makes sense to some users. A lot is dependent on the context based on what others products you are used to. For me an ‘archived’ tag would make more sense.
But, I really want to be able to use newer products because like it or hate it, more tech will be optimized like this eventually. We had a good run with plaforms optimized for us. Now time to be the grandpa to figure out kids’s VCRs like someone said above.
maybe it’s just me, I feel that after forum migration to discourse tech topics and normal discussion has greatly decreased and market activity/classifieds has just increased.
No, it’s just an incredibly dense user interface. Sometimes I feel like I’m looking at the dashboard of a fighter jet.
Eventually you’ll see that it’s just many different ways to do something or go somewhere.
Xenforo was mostly a top down structure, like file/folder structure on your disk. Discourse is more of endless looping flowchart, you’re flying from one branch to another branch.
Once you start seeing that tiered hierarchy was a poor way to organise content, everything just starts to flow.
I use notifications as my compass and branch off from there. Others use the New/Updated page.
They (Xenforo and Discourse) are completely different forum software systems, built using different languages and tech, and switching to Discourse involved a major migration. So what you’re saying isn’t really possible.
