You should see what @flattythehurdler said about it in an email that he seems to have mistakenly sent to the website, thinking he was talking privately to @Joe_Player.
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I like it weldone @Rocko good work and i know you worked hard bud. It will just take time to get used of,
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The logic is this:
If you’re reading a long thread and Person A says something and then Person B says something else and quotes Person A and then Person C comes along and quotes Person B and says something else then why would you want to see all those posts twice.
You’re reading the posts as they’re written. If someone wants to be explicit about their response by quoting the text of the reply they’re responding to then they can. But if not, there are indicators there so you can see those various interactions if you want but you aren’t compelled to read them.
Avoiding all that duplicate content should make it easier to read topics. It is sufficiently different that it certainly takes getting used to but it makes more sense in the long run. If you were building forum software from the ground-up and had never seen a forum before then this makes more sense.
That’s even more true in the case of pagination. There isn’t really a good reason why topics should be broken up at an arbitrary point - it increases the work required on the part of the reader and doesn’t make any logical sense.
You can see how twitter approaches both of those things: Responses to tweets don’t automatically contain the text of the tweet you’re responding to. And there are no pages.
There are plenty of differences between the style of communication on a forum and on twitter but that doesn’t mean that the forum style designed a decade or two ago is still the best way to manage that.
I’m not saying I fundamentally disagree with your points. Just I’ve spent a bit of time reading about this stuff and I’m happy to hitch the TFK wagon to what I believe represents the future. Forums look archaic to youngsters now - it’s disqus style commenting, facebook, twitter etc. And this isn’t trying to ape those, but it is trying to learn from their experiences in how you make reading and writing easier for everyone - the price is the upset it causes to those familiar with the old way of doing things.
For what it’s worth, the standard reaction on forums switching to discourse (that’s the new software) is that a large percentage hate it at first but they soon get used to it:
@Rocko, don’t know what it’s like on other devices but I find it very difficult to differentiate between threads with unread posts and not on the main page on the iPhone.
Some threads have the little blue ellipse with the number on of but others have nothing to signify read / unread
A couple of things here:
- It’s hard for the software to know what you read and didn’t read on the old software. So that will be confusing things.
- You get those blue icons when either:
- a thread is brand new (it will say new) and created in the past 2 days*
- a thread you have read for more than 4 minutes* has new posts in it
- It might be more natural to change that in your preferences and just want posts to be counted as new if they are new since you last read a thread at all, irrespective of whether you spent a long time reading that thread. If you change your preferences to immediately (see screenshot below) then you will see all topics you have read showing the unread post count in that blue icon.
- There are also grey icons for new posts. Those are posts that you have not yet read in a thread but they’re not new - they were there when you were last visiting that thread.
- The 2 days default and the 4 minutes default can be changed in your preferences:
yeah thats fair enough I suppose. If it makes it any better, I am not massive fan of twitter anyway and its layout. I suppose the point I would make is that if person A makes a comment, and 20 posts and a day later, someone responds to them, it can look completely out of place as to where the discussion has then gone to. The randomness of threads is what makes things interesting (to an extent) but this line of thread formation seems to be forcing people to stay to the topic and to keep the discussion very linear.
The pagination thing is just annoying as you are waiting on the next posts to be loading up rather than just being there and scrolling down. Cant say I’ve much of an issue with it one way or the other anyway.
Also, who gives a flying fuck what young people think, they can fuck off and get their own forum. This is for old cranks, wannabee hipsters and roasters to, in the most part, complain and moan about unimportant shite.
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I should point out Fran that if you opt to change your 4 minutes default to immediate then you’ll get a lot more alerts too because you’re watching those topics. Not sure if it’s possible to separate the two but I’ll look into it.
I think in your example that the poster replying to Person A should quote their post in the reply.
There’s no doubt it is designed to make things more obvious to follow and therefore by extension more linear. But the reply as linked topic helps that a bit in that you can see if things have gone off on a tangent on the original thread itself. And I have little doubt that the good people of TFK aren’t going to be changing their habits any time soon.
I said it was fucking dreadful. I stand by that. I’d have told you the same.
I am an unreconstructed Luddite who found that the old site did everything one could want in a fairly logical way.
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It looks like Gary designed it.
My main beefs are that the layout is far less clear, and I liked the way pages allowed easy wandering to and fro, and made it clear where the thread was up to, and easy to get there.
Feel free to ban me btw. I’m only a guest.
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Whoever designed Windows 8 doubtless thought it was clearer than Windows 7. Idiot.
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Why would anyone ban you?
I understand it’s different. I don’t really think it’s more complicated. And I don’t think it’s illogical. I do think the structure of replies is odd enough to be disconcerting but I can’t see much else that’s upsetting. If it’s the lack of pages… I can’t see any way in which having pages is particularly useful. It just causes you to have to click more to read anything, for no apparent reason.
It’s useful in the same way that books generally have different pages rather than one very page.
Ban me cos its bad manners really to slag off a forum which has brought me great entertainment for my minimal annual sub. It’s very bad manners, but I preferred the old site.
Doubtless I’ll adapt in time, but I agree with @Sidney about the pages. Oh and I can’t find the quote function.
Oh and the limerick half forward line looked ordinary today.
What was this fun factor? Just the post ratings? There aren’t really (m)any other features missing.
There is no need for suggested topics to keep popping up under each thread. Especially if those threads are years old.
It’s only my €0.02 but it’s not particularly easy to navigate now. Everything is fairly jumbled up. What worked well on the old site was simplicity. Click into the main section, click into soccer section. I just think it looks very unseemly now. And is not good aesthetically.
Plus removing the ratings is a big minus too. Ratings were the best things about the place. Now it’s a dose to find out who liked your post, to see an original post that is being quoted and replied too.
However like everyone on here I am a crank but it’s just my opinion on the changes.
I don’t see myself ever agreeing to the argument about pages being somehow convenient. They’re archaic. I can’t see any advantage they bring to reading a forum to be honest. They’re familiar but not much else.
I prefer them (a lot) but its your ball, and I’ll not mention it again (probably).
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