New Forums...Scary

meta
15

Couple of ways:

  1. You can use the “New” and “Unread” navigation up at the top.
  2. You can go to the landing page, and browse topics that have a blue asterisk next to them (that’s the indicator for new posts)
  3. You can read through a topic, and then at the bottom of the topic, additional new/unread topics will appear, simply letting you chain read from topic to topic until you’re all caught up.

See if you can clear the pin. Pinning in Discourse is different than it is in other forums, but Jeff hasn’t yet decided what a good alternate word is the concept he’s trying to convey. Basically, in older forums, pinning was an admin-decided, site-wide concept (think “sticky”). Here, it’s user based. If you clear your pins, they won’t affect other people’s view of the site.

16

Well quoting is certainly much easier!! But to the point:

Pinning works, in my opinion. I knew by the design (and by name) what it’s function was without really having to guess, so I think it’s working appropriately. One suggestion: Some of the threads appeared to have the ability to “clear” right from the landing page, yet for some reason, that option seemed to disappear. Consequently, I had to enter each page and un-pin them individually. It would be nice to be able to do such a thing from the landing page, or all at once somehow. Obviously there are posts you’ll want folks to read straight away and therefore “lock” them from reading anything else (like we had on our old forums), but if this is all client side, it might help streamline the work-flow a bit when it comes to pinned items if we can alter it from the landing screen and not enter each topic (unless I just missed it again… I’m still playing with the functionality).

17

You can clear the pin from the landing page if the text is short enough. I noticed that with the “meta” description, it was too long, and the area which normally shows a link to “Clear Pin” was replaced with “Read More…”

18

If you’d care more to understand the mentality behind this new software, I’d recommend this video by Jeff himself:

19

Out of curiosity, where would our former “Tech Yourself” section fall under? “Fun” or will we have a “tech” tag?

20

@Bonechatters brought this up as well; I’ve resolved it by adding a “tech” category. Start a new topic under tech, specific to your hardware question, and we’ll take it from there!

21

lol I didn’t realize someone also brought it up.

22

This is weird, but I think I can get used to it!

23

How do you change your avatar? Looks like it’s only currently linked to my e-mail for me with no seeming way to change it.

24

Go to your user preferences and then click on the link for Gravatar and then link that to your email and setup your avatar.

25

So I need to make a Word Press account?

26

https://en.gravatar.com/

I think you can link it to WP but they are separate.

27

So, here’s the deal with Gravatar and WordPress and why exactly it is confusing as fuck for users not intimately embedded in programming and software development.

When the Discourse dev team set out to do avatar management, they all agreed that they wanted it based off of a single management point. @CodingHorror is very much of the opinion that personal data–especially info related to authentication and passwords–needs to be centralized. The act of creating yet another username, password, avatar, etc. over and over boggles his mind, and I agree.

Gravatar is a very nice solution to this: A single place on the internet where you can create and manage custom avatars associated with your various email addresses. Then, as you traverse the internet, creating new accounts on new communities, if they support Gravatar, they can go out, slurp in your info automatically, and handle your little profile icons for you.

That is all that Gravatar did. A single place on the net where email addresses could be assigned to icons, and then federated out to all the websites that wished to talk. And all was right with the world…

…until WordPress bought Gravatar.

Technically, WordPress has owned Gravatar for awhile, the layman none the wiser. As we continue down the path of federated authentication, however, the powers that be decided that Gravatar being responsible for “just an icon” was wasteful–a entire set of authentication credentials could essentially be tied to an email address…not just a person’s avatar.

WordPress handled this style of “letting other websites log you in” using their own federated auth, aka WordPress Connect. But the powers that be eventually said, “Look, just fold Gravatar’s icon management into Connect ffs.” So they did. Which meant that existing Gravatar accounts were upgraded into full-blown WordPress Connect accounts. And…those that just wanted a simple good ol’ fashioned way to upload an manage an icon (read: this is all of you guys)…

…now have to create a WordPress Connect account.

Remember, the website only changed hands and altered functionality; it still does the thing that you want: centralize your ability to manage an Internet profile in one place, so that other places can refer to it. WordPress itself is a network of blogging tools, but you do not need to be a part of that (if you don’t wish to).

My advice is to simply jump through the hoops and make the Gravatar/WordPress Connect account and manage your avatar there. More websites will continue to lean on this technology, rather than less, so getting things done in one spot…once…will pay off in the long run.

1 Like
28

The irony of this situation is not lost on me.

Anyhoo, I understand the convenience of having centralized information, but that makes it an easy target, wouldn’t you say? Though I can’t speak for certain what kind of information they’re holding onto besides email addresses, it’s putting all your eggs in one basket. What’s to stop Word Press from distributing such information?

29

You mean distributing your encrypted password?

What good would that do anyone?

Further reading:

30

How does scrolling/page loading work with Discourse? Currently when I load up You laugh You lose, it takes about 3 mins for things to finally appear. images and video posts load all at once or only when a user scrolls to one? I’ll hit the arrow on the bottom right for the last post, and then I wait that 3 mins for the last post to load, while I scroll up and see other posts already half way done loading.

31

Loads external assets as you scroll to them. External, as in a linked YouTube clip or a linked animated GIF. Discourse remembers where you last were on a thread, so although you can use your old methodology of “return to a thread, click to the end, scroll back up through old posts” works, Discourse isn’t optimized for that style of jumping around.

It’s optimized to continue where you last left off, so that you don’t miss anything.

As a side note: If anything takes three minutes to load these days, you have a serious problem with either your a) internet connection or b) computer.

32

There are forum enthusiasts who leave e-mail notifications on? Hell no!

33

Don’t you want to know when we’re talking about you behind your back?

34

Should be strictly built into the UI, IMO, like the Unread tab. Nobody likes e-mail spam on an active forum.