BBS Review: One year on?

Reaction nine months on: Meh. Itā€™s a discussion system. I donā€™t especially like it, I donā€™t especially dislike it. It doesnā€™t delight, but it rarely offends. I donā€™t actually see any axis on which it was forward progress, and I still think providing both strict-chrono and threaded veiws has value (which is why newsreaders have offered both for the past several decades), but it could easily have been much, much worse. I remain unconvinced that there was a need to reinvent the wheel, but at least this one does roll.

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There is a Show Full Post button at the bottom of the first post in every Boing topic now, give it a shot.

And just in case anyone forgot, click the title at the top to jump back to the top of the topic any time. Or the left half of the topic progress bar.

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There is a Show Full Post button at the bottom of the first post in every Boing topic now, give it a shot.

Yeah, I tried that the other day and just now again, it only gives me this in Safari, Chrome, Chromium and Firefox on Mac and IE 10 in Windows 8:

Yes I noticed this too, @eviltrout is aware of this issue, we want to fix it but apparently its super complicated.

Thatā€™s what comes back from the Readability code for that particular post.

Try a different one.

Sweet lawd, what was the odds of that? Picking the wrong, random one and then again earlier. :open_mouth: Yep, this one works perfect.

Sweet! :slight_smile:

EDIT: I do find that it disappears the instant I click the ā€œlikeā€ button on the post with no option to bring it back unless I reload the pageā€¦

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Just noticed that the post picture is missing. Is there an option to load up the entire post with picture? Maybe the pictures could be thumbnails that you can click on and the expand inline or something?

Or just make the pictures a little smaller and still have them load up top but they only expand with an ā€œLoad Picturesā€ button?

This is subject to whatever the Readability code decides is part of the post. Try a different one.

Ah, I seeā€¦ this one loads up a small thumbnail. Do wish it was more consistent and always has the option at least to show photos so the posts are more complete.

Maybe the Readability code could be tweaked to always show thumbs or expand pictures like I showed above?

Anyway, thanks for the response.

I just fixed this one, overall expansions should be a bit more reliable here.

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Hello,

The only thing I find annoying is not being allowed to close your posts by signing your name. I understand that one of the ā€œrulesā€ of the BBS is that since everyone has a profile which can be viewed by clicking on their name that this means there is no ā€œtechnicalā€ reason to sign posts. However, putting a signature to what one has written online has never been a technical issue to me, but a social one; e.g., when engaging in polite written conversation, one begins with a salutation, and ends with a closing signature.

It seems to be that making a rule such as this in a modern day forum seems rather arbitrary (not capricious, but just arbitrary) to me. Itā€™s not an issue of storage, since I doubt this forum is running off of floppy diskettes like the BBSes of yore, nor are we talking about the signature blocks that made alt.fan.warlord fun to dip into on occasion in the pre-web Internet. Rather, simply about signing oneā€™s posts, which I felt have added a bit of civility and of decorum in an age where digital communications seem to be ever more impersonal and ephemeral.

Regarding signatures, see:

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Hello,

Oh, Iā€™m familiar with signatures on forums. And while those are great for telling people your system specs, what guild youā€™re in, or how many of your moggies are of the Persian, Siamese or ICanHasCheezburger variety, I think that putting oneā€™s closing salutation there, well, takes it away from the message one is trying to convey.

Signature blocks on forums serve a similar function to having your companyā€™s logo and contact information printed on stationery, in a sense. Despite having the same name, Itā€™s not the same thing, or at least, it isnā€™t to me. I do know that if someone sent me written correspondence and the closing and signature was printed onto the stationery, Iā€™d be livid. Thatā€™s the kind of behavior I expect from politicians and marketeers (not that thereā€™s too much difference between them these days, anyway) and other people who are insincere for a living.

OK itā€™s maybe a little more than a year now, but we just officially released Discourse V1:

So perhaps an appropriate time to introspect on the use of Discourse here at Boing Boing?

  • What could we do better?
  • What has improved?
  • What has continued to grate?
  • Why is Discourse so ^$&@*# awesome?

Or, you know, add your own bullets, like I did!

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Also, the suggested topic suggestions are just plain bad. Not yet had a useful one.

Pls get the images to display when embedding tweets

Stability.
Decreased friction.

search interface for topics, persons, and posts. A proper advanced search page, please.

The teamā€™s approach to iterating off of community feedback.

Iā€™d read bb for more than a handful of years, but not commented prior to bbs. I quite like most of discourse, and am sowing the seeds for a application of the platform in my day job.

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Honestly I am just surprised at how stable and quick (performance-wise) things are. I personally am doing a bad job at documenting and reporting some very, very minor quibbles (mostly a few things in the mobile version), so I will work on doing a better job at that.

All in all, without more thought, I have very little in the way of ā€œboulderā€ features or even ā€œrockā€ features, just a little bit of ā€œsandā€.

-edit-

okay, this is purely a style issue, and i suspect what i am going to bring up has been discussed.

when i am at bbs.boingboing.net, i feel like i should still be at ^boingboing.net$, and the upper left at all time should take me back to the main site and not the bbs. my personal workflow is, ā€œread article, peruse comments. read another article, peruse commentsā€. and the way I have been trained to do that, if i am ā€˜mentally lostā€™ is to hit the ā€˜home buttonā€™ in the top left.

but that is only opinion, and really has nothing to do with the awesome job Discourse has done.

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Going to echo the calls for improved search and a ā€œload all commentsā€ option.

What has improved?

Lots of things, but the progression has been so smooth, itā€™s difficult to pick just one. Overall stability, probably.

What has continued to grate?

More to do with the way itā€™s implemented here than the actual platform itself. Needs a better user guide for newbies, perhaps. Not that people would read it, but stillā€¦

Oh, and my Microplane. Thatā€™s continued to grate brilliantly.

Because itā€™s powered entirely from upcycled unicorn farts. (Is that the right answer? Did I win?)

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Whatā€™s up with all this positive feedback? Whereā€™s the angst? Whereā€™s the RAAAAAGE?

Disappoint.

Well, Suggested Topics is not very sophisticatedā€¦ it basically works this way:

  1. Show any unread topics you are tracking
  2. Show any new topics in the same category (newest first)
  3. Pick any non-closed topics from the same category at random

It relies pretty heavily on random selection after going through the new stuff in the same category. Itā€™s not actually trying to select similar topics or anything like that, just prioritizing ā€œyourā€ topics.

Where are you specifically seeing newbies have problems? What are you observing?

We hear the requests for an advanced full page search loud and clear. Will probably get to that this year. Note that we fixed a particularly heinous long standing bug with search recently so you might have gotten significantly poorer results in the past. Long storyā€¦

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Weā€™re only being nice to trolley you. :wink:

In the drill-bit thread, a new sign-up wanted to post a snap of a drill-bit, but uploading images is (IMO quite rightly) restricted for TL0 users, causing them some confusion. This isnā€™t exactly common, but itā€™s not the first time Iā€™ve seen that complaint.

Iā€™m not familiar enough with the new-user experience to fully understand what can and canā€™t be done by them along with whatā€™s needed to go from TL0 to TL1 so I went looking for the info. Now got a relevant thread bookmarked, but perhaps a link or an explanation in the ā€œWelcome to BBā€ sign-up message would be handy? Unless thatā€™s been updated since I got one. :slight_smile:

Edit: And it has been updated, having just tested it, which makes my suggestion moot. So itā€™s down to a new user not reading the info. Not sure what can be done about that. :frowning:

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Sorry, I meant the widget that suggests topics for new posts. The ones Iā€™ve been presented with have been far afield. Prolly related to search.