I’ve noticed recently what I consider to be problems with the UI of the forum itself, and I don’t know if it’s widespread, if it’s somehow just me, or if it’s something that’s being done on purpose for whatever reason.
Some examples:
If I click on the pencil icon that designates an edited post, nothing happens.
If I click on the post that someone is responding to, in order to understand exactly what is being responded to, a pop-up of sorts comes up on the bottom of the screen that says “Some replies are collapsed”, with a button to “Show All”. If I click on “Show All” the screen refreshes, but I’m not at all sure what exactly it’s refreshing to.
If I click on the “X replies” dropdown, the entire thread is reduced to just a handful of posts, with another button to “Show All” that I’m not at all sure what it does.
I don’t understand where these “changes” are coming from, but it seems quite random, and makes reading a thread, and making sense of who’s replying to what, or what’s being replied to very difficult to follow, compared to how it used to be. Is this just a KevyKevTPA problem, or is it widespread? And is it being done by the forum staff (and if so, why) or is it an error of some sort?
Any help, advice, or pointers?
Signed,
Confused about how to interpret the flow of a thread compared to “the good old days”
The first one, the post revision modal not displaying, has been brought to our attention a few times in the last couple of days. We are looking into this, but at present, I have no information that I can give you.
The second issue shipped as part of a core Discourse (the forum software) update, 2.7.0.beta2 ← You can find out about this update here.
This is a change that has been rolled out across all Discourse forums and is not limited to the MSFS forums.
When you are in filtered topic mode, a UI component will display the number of posts hidden, and clicking the “show all” button removes the filter so you can see all posts again. IIRC if there are filtered posts between two non-filter posts that make up a reply chain, the UI will indicate that X number of posts have been hidden here, you should be able to click that link to unhide those specific posts as well.
I’ve noticed these chnages too, and whilst I don’t mind how it does it, I experienced very variable behaviour. I’ve though about raising this before, but wasn;t sure exactly where, so thanks @KevyKevTPA for taking the initiative.
The problematic behaviour I’ve encountered is when I click the “show all” button. Typically I do this after I’ve clicked the link to show the post that has been replied to. So now I see that post, plus the X messages are hidden message. I then click “show all” to (hopefully) go back to the message I was originally looking at. However, when I do this, I seem to get a random outcome, one of:
I go back to the post I was looking at (the intended behaviour)
I stay on the post that was being replied to, and the hidden messages are unhidden, but now I am not looking at the post I was looking at and hev to scroll all the way back through the thread to find where I was (often hundreds of posts away)
I end up looking at the OP at the top of the thread which is neither the post I was looking at or the post that was being replied to
I end up at a random point in the thread - often 5-10 posts after the one I was originally looking at, but there is no seeming pattern to this
It may be that I am doing it all wrong and I shouldn’t be clicking “show all” to go back to where I was, but even if that isn’t what I should be doing, that button effectively takes me to a random post.
This is even worse on mobile, where navigation is trickier anyway
It’s getting to the point where it is easier to simply not look back to see posts that have been replied to
This is probably the single, most annoying new “feature” of Discourse IMHO. It just seems to make reading previous thread so much worse than before, and when you collapse to return, it doesn’t necessarily take you back to the spot you were previously, so now you have to scroll around to find your last position. This is especially annoying when dealing with those large “threadzillas” that pop up with official announcements, updates, etc.
And to be clear, not blaming you guys or anything. It is what it is. It’s a feature of Discourse. I just don’t like it at all.
It’s made it near nightmarish to try to read previous threads being replied to on mobile. I don’t even bother any more because of this feature.
I’m conflicted about the change myself. Part of me likes the filtered view, part of me hates it. I definitely share your sentiments about ending up in the wrong place when the filter is removed. I don’t know if we’re just using it wrong, or if there is an underlying bug there.
Whenever you have feedback about forum functions, styles, or categories you can create a post in general discussion using the tag forum-feedback. This tag gives certain members of the team a notification that your topic has been created.
I suspect a bug personally. I know how it should work - or at least my interpretation of how it should work. It just doesn’t most of the time. Sometimes it does though, typically when you’re dealing with the last post in a thread. The way it functions seems to make no sense.
On mobile though, it turns it into a hair-pulling experience. I find it really robs the forum of useful functionality when you’re trying to reference what someone is replying to.
@Nyx1819, then undo the update. As you’ve seen in the limited participation in this thread, as well as your own personal experiences, it isn’t working at doing whatever it was intended to do. I’m at the point that I don’t even bother trying to expand responses, or clicking on the post being responded to because I will get totally lost as to where I am or what I was attempting to read.
It has made trying to follow along with the flow of a thread almost impossible, so I vote for just removing the “update” and going back to the old version.
Or getting entirely new forum software might be a good option, too, I haven’t been a fan of this one since I first arrived here.
I rather like Discourse. I don’t like what these updates have done. It seems to have robbed us of what was great functionality and replaced it with functionality that partly works sometimes only. Definitely not a step in the right direction IMHO.
Then again, I’m just a guy with an opinion and a big mouth. lol
That would be a huge problem, as all historical posts would be lost. I don’t think that would even remotely be an option.
Well, no, if that is in fact the case, they you’re right, we don’t want to lose historical data. But I’m really outside of my area of expertise, except to say I’ve lived through forum software changes in other forums before where the data wasn’t lost, but I have exactly zero clue how one would go about making that happen, or how difficult or expensive it might be.
But agree, no throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
That isn’t possible, Discourse updates often include security fixes for vulnerabilities, so doing a rollback because of a UI issue is inadvisable at best and reckless at worse.
With that said, in my original post, I provided a link to the patch notes for the update that brought in this feature. Per the patch notes, it is a toggleable feature, meaning the CMs could disable it and restore the older reply functionality. However, this is a site-wide setting that affects everyone and we have had users in the past ask for just a feature so I don’t know what way the decision would go.
If you believe the feature itself should be improved, you are more than welcome to create a bug report on Discourse Meta, and it may just get added to the next Discourse update.
agree, no throwing the baby out with the bathwater.