Discourse Annoyances

Meta & Site Feedback
1

Let’s just output what we think are a bit bad with Discourse, to see if we can fix them or if they are dealbreakers.

  • Notification setup comes to mind
  • Minimum post length (sometimes you just want to say “thanks”)
2

Notification setup comes to mind

Notications defaults for users can be changed in the Discourse admin page.

Minimum post length (sometimes you just want to say “thanks”)

Probably can be changed too, but I prefer it. You can use the little heart icon to like posts.

3 Likes
3

The limit of one category per post, I read somewhere in the docs that you can add a tag system for discourse through a plugin (or something else), should we look into that?

4

Probably can be changed too, but I prefer it. You can use the little heart icon to like posts.

I agree, if you want to say thanks use the :heart: button. For all other cases I feel it’s really good to have the minimum length to improve on the overall conversation quality.

5

Not sure that is needed at the moment. I actually like the current restriction of one category per post, so post authors have to think twice about what content to put where.

6

Tags are sometimes useful as additional, optional layer of “loose” metadata.

Tagging was introduced into Core in April of 2016.
If you are using Discourse 1.6.0.beta2 or later, you do not need plugin anymore :rocket:

It just needs to be enabled via Admin panel:

7

I don’t like how Discourse suggests users when you use the @ symbol. Unlike on GitHub, it brings up a list, but tab doesn’t autocomplete if there is only one possible person, which means that my traditional type + tab + enter leads to posting whatever I was writing, even if it was a draft, as tab goes to the ‘reply’ button.

8
  • Closing and archiving a topic doesn’t seem to do anything, that I can tell.
  • Going to a different page doesn’t close the respond field; it’s still here, even as I look at the list of topics. That is very strange.
9

List of differences between “Closed” and “Archived”:

2 Likes
10

As for annoyances: Markdown dialect supported by Discourse does not provide the same feature set as the dialect at Github.

For example:

11

Not sure what you mean. Typing @ric here only suggests your name:

…and if I press enter or tab it’s autocompleted. To highlight a different name in a list of multiple suggestions you can use your arrow keys to move through them. As far as I know, we’re following the same conventions as Twitter.

12

Hmm. Autocomplete appears to be working for me now; I may have been confused. However, it still takes a few seconds before it loads; is there a need for the delay?

13

Is this happening on desktop? I can imagine it being a tad slower on mobile, but on desktop the response time for me is <0.5 seconds. We might see some speed improvements with the update to Ember 2.4+ though.

14

Yeah, on Desktop. I don’t really use my mobile for anything. :slight_smile:

15

It seems natural that we enabled Github login for discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/t/configuring-github-login-for-discourse/13745

That way when asking someone to move a conversation over here, it does not have the trouble of registering a new user/pw.

2 Likes
16

Badges suck badly…

17

Other annoyances:

  1. I was blocked for posting too many topics, but I only opened 3
  2. another post of mine was shadow-banned, and I don’t know where it is now. I was asking what is ipfs-js?
18

When using Discourse with default settings new users are severely limited to fight spam.
Perhaps someone with access to /admin panel could ease them up a bit?

Defaults often backfire and decrease community participation, as people create first post and it gets rejected or is not approved by moderators in timely manner.