It’s not discourse but a plugin that was broken for a while and is now working 
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Discourse isn’t my absolute favourite forum software, or it wasn’t, previously. This is a pretty nice update, and I think it fits the needs of this place pretty damn well. For broader, multi-purpose fora I think it’d be a bit awkward, but for something as focused as Stimhack it’s pretty great.
(Now to read through the hundreds of posts that appear in threads I watch each time I forget to check in for a couple of days. I’m so behiiind.)
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Mind telling me what you find a bit awkward?
Well, please note first that I’m just more familiar with Xenforo, so that influences what I expect/am used to reaaally heavily. Browse Spacebattles/Sufficient Velocity regularly, lurked for ages, etc. So a large part of it is fighting against expectation.
The big thing is honestly on my end, mostly. Checking the forum regularly, remembering to sort by Categories, remembering to click on “Unread” for faster finding of the things I’m already invested in.
It’s a bit of a nuisance to have to go to discussions I’ve had with people either through my profile or through the alerts, a little link to just messages up top would be great for making them easier to use.
I also find it tends to be a bit slow, likely because of the auto-save and real-time updating (both of which are wonderful features). I only notice because I have a nightmarish number of tabs open in the first place, and tend to come on, open up a dozen tabs for different threads, and find that they all load pretty slowly. This… might also just be a me thing, really.
But I’d like to also emphasize that I don’t think it’s awkward for this at all. Discourse is the best forum thing I could think of for something like Stimhack, and I think any targeted-interest forum would do well to consider using it. It’s for the bigger, broader fora (see again: Spacebattles) that I think there’d be issues, due to the number of users and the huge scope of categories necessary.
This is, again, not a criticism, because one size does not fit all. It’s much better to have the option to do something like this on this software and something like SV on Xenforo than have everyone forced into using one or the other. They fill different niches, and do it well.
My comment earlier was possibly a bit unintentionally rude where I more meant it to be honest, and if that’s the case, my apologies. It really is a gorgeous system, and I hope the off-the-cuff comment didn’t come as a slight to all the hard work you’ve put in for it.
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Lol, don’t worry. I didn’t take your comment as rude at all 
I’m not sure I understand your workflow. Mind explaining what you’re trying to do?
Personally, I have it set up to automatically track every topic I enter. Then, if I loose interest in a topic, I change the tracking level to regular. When I come back to the forum, I usually click the first one that has something new and then I browse all interesting topics using the Suggested Topics list at the bottom of each topic.
Mind browsing any of our customers’s forum and telling me if you notice any difference? (this particular instance isn’t hosted by us)
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Actually, this is a very good idea - let’s share the workflows that we use on this forum. Since it’s vastly different than most of the standard ones (phpBB, invisio) that I’ve used, I also am not sure I’m doing the optimal thing.
Also, I use the following keyboard shortcuts
- J/K to go next/previous post/topic
- O to open the highlighted topic
-
L to
the highlighted post - F to bookmark (follow) the highlighted post/topic
- R to reply to the highlighted post
the highlighted post
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what are these exactly?
When you use J/K you will see a redish bar on the left of the “currently highlighted” post/topic.
Oh that’s cool.
Can we bookmark/sticky this somewhere?
You can also press the ? key anywhere but in the composer to display the list of all available shortcuts (and it’s also available in the hamburger menu)
Not a problem! I was mostly explaining that I think a good chunk of my issues are user-error.
I come to the main page, and scroll through looking for topics that are both of interest to me and seem short enough (in unread post terms) that I can get through them in the time I have. I CTRL+Click each of these as I find them to open them all in new tabs (which can range between two and eight discussions), then either close the main tab so Chrome sends me to the first discussion or click on a discussion and tab over while it loads on the tab I’m on.
Frequently, the new tabs haven’t even come close to loading, and take 5-10 seconds (or more, sometimes) to do so.
Browsing one discussion at a time might be easier for my poor computer and more effective, going to give it a shot. It’s a holdover from Xenforo’s alerts system, where they tell you when a thread updates… once. And if you check alerts but don’t actually go mark things as read by checking them out, you don’t get more updates.
And I frequently have so many tabs open that I can’t see the icons for any of them, let alone letters or anything.
So… yeah. M’point is, this is a thing that happens but that is probably not Discourse’s fault when I actually think about it.
[quote=“zogstrip, post:25, topic:4062”]
Mind browsing any of our customers’s forum and telling me if you notice any difference? (this particular instance isn’t hosted by us)
[/quote]Tried six at random, they’re maybe slightly faster, but not by much if so. That said, I’m going to try changing how I browse (as noted above) and see if that makes a difference over the next week or so. Won’t remove the tabs-issue (though I’m… working on that, too), but this is something I’ve noticed to some extent even when I not so overloaded on other tabs.
So, yeah. Will try changing things, report back if I notice a difference.
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Yeah, Discourse being a client-side application, it’s somewhat larger than other typical websites and having a bunch of tabs open won’t help with performance issues
We’re spending tremendous amount of time to make sure we properly keep track of what’s new, what you’ve read and what might interest you. In these departments, we’re light-years ahead of the competition and you might be surprised once you get accustomed.
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This is pretty much my workflow as well. On a decent computer I don’t have any problems loading the topic, on an old computer is I can see a delay.
Discourse knows Kung-Fu. XD
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