Here we’re only talking about SuttaCentral, and that’s what the figures are for. As for Discourse, I don’t think we use analytics, but there are numbers provided by Discourse itself. But I haven’t really looked at them.
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It’s called Stackexchange. But seriously, you can find out anything about how to do things in Google by … googling it.
I’ll post something about the numbers on 1st December.
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Ahh, the developer’s guilty secret …
You can, just as you can find out about anything on SC by asking here. But if you don’t know what to ask, you’re in the same boat.
I can’t count the number of times people have asked me, “how do I find out …?” It became a running joke at Santi for a while. I really had to say to people: just type the most obvious thing you can think of into google. Even after using it for so long, we don’t realize what it can do.
Having said which, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to integrate a manual with an auto-suggest in the search bar. Blake has taken off the auto-suggest feature for now, because we had stability problems, but it would be good to get it back at some stage. Then we could index the Help or How-to in the search. You could type: “how” and it would trigger a list of features and how-tos. Anyway, just an idea.
But my basic point remains: rather than rely on a monolithic manual, its best to figure out how to help a user seamlessly and just-in-time. It’s not always possible, of course, but when it works it’s much better. Discourse is a pretty good example of that, they give you popups and so on very nicely.
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Sure, such manuals may no longer be the best way to go and it’s all about intuitive design and so on, but at the same time, if someone’s been bothered to develop a bunch of features, it surely makes sense to consider how they can be utilised by as many as possible.
Out of curiosity, which features?
ditto
are they relevant to regular users or just to the devs?
To back up @Vimala Bhikkunī, I didn’t know that I could add tags to threads. I didn’t read about that anywhere, I just discovered it, which was nice in it’s own way but I could’ve found out earlier I suppose?
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Nice, thanks @SCMatt (although I thought SuttaCentral was the focus rather than Discourses). Just to clarify, I didn’t for a moment doubt Venerable’s discoveries I just wanted to pinch her acquired tricks for myself (as well as bring them to the attention of others reading the thread)! 
I think she’s absolutely right in her interest in making SC features more accessible to users if there are any that might benefit them. I’m not quite convinced by the argument that ‘need-born quest’ should be the primary driver of learning what is available on the site, and use my experience with Sublime Text as an example.
Bhante very generously mentioned Sublime Text in these pages a while ago so I had a look. On the face of it, it just looked like any other text editor, but I watched a couple of short tutorials and learned of many of the ways in which it is awesome just as he promised. I wouldn’t have switched application unless I’d been shown some of its features which I’d no real cause to look for by myself, but am mightily glad I did. Sure, it’s not an entirely comparable case, but is good enough to show that having stuff you weren’t necessarily looking for highlighted can be splendid.
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I don’t want to put a damper on any enthusiasm! If you have any issues with SC, feature requests and the like, please post them here.
As for Discourse, this is pretty much off-the-shelf, so we have limited ability to customize. Still, some things can be done, so don’t hesitate to ask.
Oh yes, please, that would be great…
hmppph, not necessarily! I think perhaps you take for granted the ease and familiarity you have with such things. I for one feel far less stressed and I’m much more likely to use something a lot when I can easily look up what the features are and how to use them. This isn’t true for me with other things which I’ll happily figure out and play around with and find out what I need to know, but anything to do with technology, electronics, screens, gadgets, computer applications and the like…well, I just want to scream (to put it mildly)… Sorry, guess I’m a luddite.
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One of the things I stumbled on in the last months was the Textual Images. If you go to a Pali sutta and turn on the Textual Information, you might see something like this:
When you click on the little book behind PTS 1.1, you get a scanned image of the original page of the PTS edition.
I did not know this feature was there until I broke it and somebody started complaining.
Another feature I often have to explain to people is that if you highlight part of the sutta-text, you can copy the URL of that highlighted part and use it in posts or emails.
Something I think many people do not know is why there are different fonts, markups, etc. on the text and what they mean. For instance, texts added by the translator, editorial editions or unclear reconstructions of the text.
And how many people know that for most languages, you can access the language pages directly like for instance polish is here: SuttaCentral
I agree with Bhante that a manual is a bit old-fashioned. Maybe a tutorial of some sort is more appropriate.
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This feature is highly specialized, and only of interest to Pali scholars who want to check variant readings. Which is very, very few! Currently it has a title attribute, “View page image”. I think that’s good enough for such a limited usage.
Incidentally, the image there is a placeholder, it should be replaced with the appropriate Unicode glyph, U+1F4D6.
This is indeed a cool feature, and we should promote it. Any idea how?
These should all be described by appropriate title attributes. The alternative, used everywhere else, is to use some plain text markup [like square] brackets or (round ones) and {even curly ones} and expect people to know what they mean. If the existing style and/or title attributes need improvements, fine, but I don’t know of a better approach. One possibility might be to use the FAQ page here on Discourse for such things.
This will be superseded with the i18n version.
How about adding some “did you know” text in the sidebar under the Controls tab (there is enough space there).
Or have a random “did you know” popup with “tip of the day” upon startup. Or have a tutorial that runs through different features (activated from the sidebar maybe). Lots of options.
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Thank you!
Nifty - I knew I’d be pleased I asked (and won’t say anything about Firefox and will just start using Chrome for SC 
).
I thought the question was more a matter of just helping people better understand how SC does what it does than change what it does.
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Aaahhh … another one!!! 
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Oooops 
- I said (and I trusted I was speaking for the whole SC usership) I’d switched to Chrome.
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It still has to work on Firefox too!!!
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was my thought as well until i read your comment, a kind of a legend for the features available
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Here’s another small critique based on real-world experience, I was singing the praises of SC to a friend and he retorted that “but you can’t tell who did the translation”. I had to show him that you go to the three lines at the upper left and then click on “metadata”. It’s a bit hidden.
I would say that a feature like that should be promoted “in context”, in other words when you highlight some part of a sutta. Pop-ups in general are pretty bad user experience but maybe one here is justified.
