So far the new forum is improvement IMO. But the “old forum” show the last poster in list views, and it was useful — and that’s missing in Discourse.
There is the posters topic-list-data next to each post in view that show some avatars like:
and if you hover… you can find out who the most recent and orginal poster are.
But this tedious when a little CSS could “stylize” the avatars to highlight the same info the HTML already has. For example, using an color outline or box around it:
I cheat with semantic HTML <mark>/<kbd>, CSS could do better
Point being doing something other a “hover” event to find out “most recent poster” and “orginal poster” with “frequent poster” being unstyle
Apprrenlty markdown is not allowed in titles, perhaps okay, found that out now too.
This functionality already exists. The last avatar on the right is the last poster. The first avatar is the original poster (topic starter). When the OP is the last poster, the avatar is highlighted in blue.
It’s somewhat subtle but visible once you know what to look for.
I personally would prefer user names instead of avatars as many users don’t have any, including well-known forum veterans (whose posts I usually find valuable to read). But the “less text, more visuals” is the modern trend that caters to the masses…
Above for @jaclaz “ultimate flowchart” thread where he’s the OP and most recent poster… @lurker888 was 2nd most. So it kinda make sense.
And, yes, hover tells me all this. But I could tell both OP and most recent poster without moving my mouse (and waiting for hover). I just hate large styling elements that don’t communicate much information vs space used.
For example, the fact @jaclaz was BOTH is something I’d like to know. Instead, got 5 icons tell me the usual posters, posted.
Not sure if you missed my point above. Do you see how the first circle (jaclaz’s avatar) has a blue halo? You can see it without using the mouse. With some themes this indication stands out more.
I agree it would be more logical to have the last poster be the last avatar and just show the same avatar twice when the OP is the last poster. But I already accepted that most functions in Discourse are not driven by logic but by visual design ideas.
There is a theme that clearly separates the OP and the last poster. It also spells out user name, something I miss from phpBB as not all users have an avatar. And having many users with differently colored letters “A”, for example, really doesn’t say anything about the user on the topic list. I kind of have to remember my own.
That a better design (perhaps quibble on fonts). The stacking is nice — not everything need a column.
If “Sam” theme could “stacked” #Posts over #View, that be great.
For bonus, a minified icon next to OP under title… so you could see the “rose color” of A, which be another visual clue who it is when reduced to a large A.
I think you accidentally omitted a qualifying attribute in your sentence, here it is: inadequate
feel free to apply it to either “functions” or “visual design ideas”, or both.
The actual theme probably looks different from the screenshot above. I just quickly searched for themes, found this one, and copied the screenshot from the Discourse forum. It appears to have evolved over time. Regardless, the current theme selection is very poor and hardly changes anything. Having some actual themes installed, not just color changes, could benefit some users.
The theme author specifically mentioned phpBB users when creating it, so it’s possible that it might give an experience closer to the old forum if someone still can’t get used to the new one.
I guess adequacy is always subjective. My point is that Discourse is built on ideas about how it should look like, full stop. Browsing some Discourse discussions, I see this intent very clearly, striving for UI minimalism. Functionality and logic are secondary and are bent to fit into the primary objective. This is the same type of people that immediately hate WinBox 3 because “it looks like Windows 95”.
I dabbled in some .NET programming myself, and for me the primary objective has always been functionality. And then trying to make the UI look decent as long as it doesn’t detract from functionality and convenience.
I think the backend is pretty good. All the posting drafts, previewing - even navigating while editing on top of all browser stuff like etc etc etc… That shit’s hard. It hadn’t really “lost” a message (unlike phpBB). Not all lemons here.
But agree seems there a lot “philosophy” – too much – from reading their forum to resolve my complaints & leaving unsatisfied. More annoying is could not even some distillation of their overall “philosophy” other than “minimal”…
