Iâm making my way around Discourse/SuttaCentral. I very much like it, however, there is one thing which I am having a little bit of difficulty withâeveryone looks like new members.
It would be great if, in the small pop-up box (when you click on a userâs profile icon), along with âLast postâ and âJoinedâ, there would also be â receivedâ and âPostsâ.
Knowing someoneâs past activity has many uses, and while the join date can be used for this, it may simply mean that the account was created, but the user hasnât posted much or hasnât really returned. Also, I guess you could go to the full profile page of each member, but doing this takes quite a lot of time compared to simply clicking on the profile icon.
A few reasons why â receivedâ and âPostsâ are useful:
If you see that a member is new, it can help you understand his/her posts better, or more importantly, adjust your replies accordingly (be more helpful).
Vice versa with long-time contributors.
Knowing that a user has participated and been here for quite some timeâand even more so if he/she has lots of likes, or more likes than postsâcan help you pinpoint good users, so you can read more of their posts, or read their posts more carefully.
Having lots of posts but very little likes might be a small reminder to try and post more valuable content (quality rather than quantity), or to improve the quality of your posts in general.
Something along the lines of (I hope you donât mind if I use your profile, Ayya Vimala ):
Well, the first card is just a summary, but all this detailed info is there, just click again on the user profile and youâll see full details of badges, posts, and so on. Does that help?
On facebook (dare I mention it!) when you hover over a userâs avatar you get a popup/flyout like the screenshot above.
Iâm not sure if thatâs what @samseva is suggesting, but Iâd find it useful. Plus, Iâve been conditioned by the facebook overloards so I âexpectâ it to happen here.
Yes, I do this, but itâs quite laborious and you have to exit the thread page you were reading (also, please see next reply).
Yes, thatâs it. You just have to click on the userâs icon and a small rectangle box pops up. Itâs really useful to know a little about the poster (especially the short intro, and if posts and likes are added, you could know about userâs participation/contribution on SC).
I thought it was something that was easily modifiable (Iâve been reading around on meta.discourse.org ). Maybe if a post is made there, they code provide the 1-2 lines of code to add to SC.
If youâre interested in providing feedback to the devs of this forum software, please see https://meta.discourse.org/. My limited experience there has found that the developers themselves are responsive to oneâs suggestions and feedback.
Ah, so the software isnât modified according to the forum owners (similar to phpBB)? Iâll try to propose the idea to the Discourse developers (unless users here think it might be a bad idea).
I just had a check of the Admin options, and canât see anything like this. We run a pretty vanilla version of Discourse, just a bit of theming and SC integration plugin. You can try meta, see what they have to say.
Apropos of nothing, working on the new site, I always remember something I read somewhere, that building software in the browser is the single most developer-hostile environment ever created. You have to use these languages created for quite different purposes, and cobble them together to make something that works on billions of different devices, of all sizes and shapes, different connectivity, different software, different user settings, with all the viruses and hacks and dependencies and plugins that can break anything any time. Itâs amazing that anything works!
Sure, you can modify anything you want, itâs all open source. But see above!
Oh, and also, hover doesnât work for touchscreens, so even if you make such a change, you have to figure out how to handle that.
Iâm on Safari (laptop) and while hovering doesnât do anything, clicking once on usersâ icon brings up the small rectangular pop-up (the one I was talking about), and clicking another time opens up a new page with the userâs main profile info.
If you are doing this yourself, then full sympathies.
And itâs turtles all the way down. Even at the hardware/silicon level, where decades of cruft are held together by duct-tape and entrenched managers demand results by yesterday. Currently, the worst practices are present in the smartphone industry where use-and-throw-away has become the motto, fuelling a culture of planned obsolescence by manufacturers.
No, we have wonderful developers who do the hard work. I just offer âmoral supportâ (i.e. tell them it doesnât work and change the design half way through!)
I always try to bear this in mind when dealing with developers. Even though I canât program, I make it a point to mess around with code, get my hands dirty, have some feel for whatâs actually going on. Still, we do have the advantage of not worrying too much about legacy support. Weâve always been future-oriented in development, and luckily there are legacy sites that can serve people who are stuck on IE6.
Yes, this is a huge problem for the planet. Itâs not so bad for front-end development, because you can assume that most mobile users will have devices that arenât too old.
I talked about this to my friend Dustin once, who used run an IT manufacturing company. He just laughed and said, of course, yes thatâs what everyone does. You can understand it from a business point of view, but it is really harmful when itâs the standard practice in such a prominent industry.
⌠and coming up with new features that also have to be implemented before the launch date ⌠in other words, he does the important task: being the boss.
It isnât a good idea. However, from the discussion and from reading articles on Jeff Atwoodâs blog (the lead creator of Discourse), he clearly is kind of a genius, and really innovative, with online discussion groupsâfrom the platform and all the way to the psychology of it. Matt Mullenweg/WordPress kind of genius.
I donât know the future, but I wouldnât be surprised at all if Discourse catches on even more than Stack Exchange (which he partly developed and owned), and to some degree like WordPress.
When Jeff says heâs âviolently opposedâ to this idea âin any formâ, and says âThat will not changeâ, I donât know, do you kind of get the impression that heâs wavering on it?
But it is a fascinating read on what happens when users start to behave in a âlike-seekingâ way. One of the nice things about Discourse is that itâs built by people with experience in multiple generations of discussion platforms, and who have learned their lessons and bake them into the software as much as possible. No forum can survive without careful and considerate moderation (shout out to our wonderful moderators!), but Discourse makes it as easy as possible.
Then next generation will be using AI to moderate and manage discussion; of course this is already happening on FB, Youtube, and so on, with mixed results. Aussie Youtubers are up in arms right now, because the algorithm punishes them for swearing too much!
receivedâ and âPostsâ.
):
). Maybe if a post is made there, they code provide the 1-2 lines of code to add to SC.
