[Poll] Do you prefer the old BLF or the new BLF?

BLF Site-related Issues
42

Well, the reply will be specific to the post that you clicked the reply button on.

The profile pic and username will appear in the header of your reply with an email-style reply arrow to their left. Clicking on this will display the entire post you replied to. So in a way, quotes aren’t even necessary anymore. But if you’re responding to specific lines they can still be helpful.

If you want your response to be to the topic creator and not another person in the thread, then just use the reply button on the original post. The one on the bottom of the thread works the same.

Edit: The easiest way to quote on PC is to select the text you want to quote with your cursor. A button will appear at the top of the selected region of text and if you click it, the quote will be inserted wherever your cursor is in your message draft. If you didn’t have a draft open yet then one will be created and opened.

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43

I would not have figured that out in 6 million minutes. Thanks!!!

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44

No problem! It’s one of those features that’s very efficient in use but isn’t as easily discoverable in the first place.

@Toykeeper Would it be possible to make the quote button (generated by selecting text) green or something? Might help with the discoverability.

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45

Here’s a quick plug for the FAQs page, and please let me know if anything there is unclear or missing:

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46

Interestingly, I just stumbled across it. I was highlighting some text to do a copy/paste and saw the “quote” option… and clicked it.
Shazaam!

:rofl:

47

If my math is correct, that equals about 11.4 years.
Maybe you would have figured it out by then. :stuck_out_tongue:

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48

Yes, it should be possible to make that button (and others in the same pop-up menu) more prominent. It’ll still only appear while text is highlighted though.

Anyway, I added a bookmark to remind myself next time I’m messing with the stylesheets. I also have more work to do on the chat widget. BLF doesn’t have chat enabled, but I want the theme to work on other Discourse sites too.

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49

Yeah, just found this thread, and agree 100% with this.

The old forum was pretty much just click’n’go, and you figure out stuff as you went along.

New forum is like learning a whole new OS. You might get by with the basics, but if you want to get any sort of value from it, you gotta pretty much immerse yourself in it, find and read documentation, pretty much go for your PhD to get around. Lotta people just don’t have the time to do that.

Like at my last job, they had this big expansive Project Management Dashboard which could do 100 brazillion things. Yeah, great, if you’re a manager and have time to learn those ins and outs to navigate around, because you’ll be in it and using it for probably 60% to 80% of your entire workday. So you can afford to, and in fact need to, make that “investment”.

But if you’re just a worker drone trying to get your shiite done, you just don’t have the time to play around with it, try this and that, try different features, learn, learn, learn. Shiite’s gonna get done, and the choice is to ignore one or the other, or just put in massive amounts of extra (unpaid) time to try to do both.

The new forum might be great, and powerful, and customisable, and be able to do everything but make homemade pizza for you, but how much effort is one person supposed to put in? It’s supposed to be fun, not work.

I’ve heard arguments that (about other things, not just this), “Oh, you’re just too lazy to put in the work”. Well, yeah. Why should it be work just to do something that used to be done effortlessly and seamlessly?

XYZ doesn’t work with your browser. Install another one.

Why should anyone have to? Whatever happened to the days of “graceful degradation”? Nowadays, it’s “we demand the latest or at least paenultimate versions of ZYX browser”. Maybe you’re working on an old laptop or desktop that can’t handle the newest browsers, simply because of bloat and eye-candy. (Vista, anyone?) Maybe you’re short on disk space. Maybe you’re just sick and tired of having to use 4 different browsers for different websites that get cranky of they can’t get a particular flavor of browser. Maybe you don’t want to have as your default, a retarded browser that doesn’t even let you save a webpage or rightclick to save/view an image.

The same no-talent “webdesigners” just lego together bits and pieces from webkits (look at ALL weather sites related to weather.com, that all misbehave the same exact way), and their attitude is, “Well, we’re using this webkit, and if it’s only supported by this browser and version, then that’s what you should use”. Ie, the “let them eat cake” attitude.

So the question becomes, just how far are you expected to chase a particular website/forum/etc.? Install and use a new browser? Get new hardware? Study endless documents just learning how to do the basics?

You lose people along the way, and the only question is how many.

50

Times are a-changing. :slight_smile:
More and more forums are switching to Discourse and once you made the effort to know one of them you know all of them.

I do know exactly how you feel though, first time I had to use Discourse I was like “WTF is this?”. Now I find old-style forums just old, boring and … worse.

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51

Hey there @Lightbringer. I hear your point, and I’m not denying that the migration from the old Drupal forum to Discourse was indeed a major change, and it does require adapting muscle memory actions compared to more conventional forums. But don’t forget about the other side of the coin: the amount of work required for the forum administrator. Any web-facing software needs to be constantly maintained at the very least with security patches to the software itself, and then it needs to be heavily revised from time to time to be compatible with the server “stack” that runs underneath the webapp, most importantly PHP (which Discourse mercifully does not use). The Drupal developers were extremely wishy washy about the future of the version we were running, and for years it felt like the sword of Damocles was hanging over my head. The old Drupal software was an absolute disaster to maintain, and it was running on borrowed time. And the next versions after Drupal 7 were a radical departure from all versions before them and they simply would not have worked as a forum at the scale of what BLF needs. So the migration had to be done. The Drupal 7 end-of-life would have come around in 2020 except that they threw a lifeline to Drupal administrators due to the pandemic. The only other forum engine that offers the community moderation features that BLF has come to depend on is this current one, full stop. I’ll copy/pasta a few other comments I’ve made to that respect as well:

It always turned into an arms race between the PHP version that keeps increasing, and the latest version of Drupal 7 that is on life support (only security and major bug fixes) and only worked on a specific version of PHP. You all didn’t see a lot of ugly PHP errors, but with my admin account my BLF page was plastered with deprecation warnings and array errors and little bugs resulting from the kludged Drupal 7 support for a semi-modern PHP version that was still on security maintenance support. And this also limited my choice of OS for the server, as it needed to still support the version of PHP that Drupal 7 needed. Add to that the fact that the old BLF used a ton of piecemeal add-on frameworks for core functionality (again, Drupal has almost no features out-of-the-box), also written in PHP, which all got updated at different rates, and some not at all. The most beloved features of the old forum such as the community moderation system and the email notification system and even the Subscriptions page were all bespoke little snowflakes created with a graphical interface that got me about 90% of the way there, but still required blocks of raw PHP code for the last 10%. And those would break too between major Drupal version upgrades and/or major PHP version upgrades.

Drupal 8 was such a radical paradigm shift that not even the official drupal.org website was migrated to version 8 for a long time after its release. EDIT: Turns out I was wrong, drupal.org is still stuck on Drupal 7… let that sink in for a minute. All of the community-maintained add-ons that almost all site administrators depended on for basic functionality had to be re-written, and since Drupal always required a lot of tweaking to make it work as a forum, most of those add-ons fell by the wayside. Drupal has always been very barebones out-of-the-box, and site administrators have always depended on community add-ons, but with the advent of Drupal 8 they started treating it as more of a development framework for experienced web programmers, which personally I am not.

I would say that the usability and discoverability of the old forum UI was marginally good, but not ideal. As proof of that, I would receive multiple PMs every month from new users asking “How do I post a new thread?”. Of course not everything is perfect here yet either, but it’s important to differentiate between usability and familiarity. And as for functionality, Discourse has the old Drupal platform beat hands-down, at least as far as forum functionality goes. Its functionality does apparently need to be made a lot more discoverable though.

Fun fact regarding those Drupal ?page=N links: There was a bug in Drupal for the administrator user, which could see unpublished “removed” posts in a thread, and that messed up the post numbering. So I would get a tip from somebody about “post #89” or even a direct link http://budgetlightforum.com/comment/N#comment-N and it would either take me to the wrong post, or else the last post visible on a page was actually not the last post. I usually resorted to manually changing the URL query parameter to /node/N?page=999 just to see all the comments in a thread.

I agree here, I’m not entirely happy with the Discourse developers’ stance on browser support either and I don’t like forcing the hand of users. But on the other hand it must be admitted that it’s a really bad idea to browse the internet with unmaintained browsers or older versions that are unmaintained (going back to the web-facing apps and security patches thing). And Discourse does work on all currently maintained versions of Firefox (including the much older/slower-to-change Firefox ESR branch), on any derivative browsers that forked from there, as well as the entire plethora of browsers based on Chrome/Chromium. The main barrier in practical terms with Discourse is for users of old iPads and iPhones, but that’s largely Apple’s fault and doesn’t apply in your desktop usage case anyway. However, I know you personally had a lot of issues with several of the “supported” browsers that I can’t explain…, I’m really sorry for that, and I don’t deny that it happened to you. But it’s apparently a single case that happened only given an extremely specific and unique environment, as I searched long and hard and honestly couldn’t find anything similar. I’m really glad you’re back online with us, and my sincere thanks for sticking with it.

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52

Absolutely, and don’t mistake observation for complaint. Well, I can complain about lousy/lazy webdevs, but that’s not your fault, and I remember previous discussions about drupe being on life-support from way back, and that something eventually had to be done.

Remember back in the day, websites that went flash-only? No “deep links” even possible, so if you (in this case, I) wanted to buy a coffee machine, this one retarded site (Tassimo or something fancy-schmancy-sounding like that) would make you navigate from the homepage and you could only hope that you’d find it again. Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything from that company.

The biggest thing I’ll always bitch about is when pages are rewritten in-place via javascript, vs creating a new one. Eg, I’m replying to this post. I finish the reply, and now I’m not at, say, message 242 where I was reading, but now at the bottom, at (my) new message 268. In The Old Days, I could just click [back] and be at the previous message, the one I was reading and replying to, and the now-updated page would have my message at the bottom. Now? I click [back], and I’m at the homepage or wherever I was previously. Instead, I gotta go scroll around all over Hell’s Creation to find where I was.

I could even shift-click to get a new tab with the reply, etc. Now? Doubt it (didn’t try, but…). Ie, new tab, new thread, vs having to click on the new thread and have it forced to be in the same tab. (I do that with amazon, vipon, etc., all the time, so I can keep on product X and “explore” product Y in a different tab. If the contents of the page would just be rewritten in place, that wouldn’t be possible. I’d have to finish looking at product Y, Z, etc., and then have to back-back-back to product X.)

And yeah, there’s some trick with clicking on “back to parent message” or whatever, but I just tried that when I was on/around message 8 in this thread, and after replying and clicking on that, was somewhere in the low-40s, like, “last message from that user” or something. Now lost. Hitting [back] obviously wouldn’t work, so had to zip to the very top and start scrolling back down again 'til I found it. Frustrating.

The point was that each prior page was a “snapshot” of what you were doing, and you could back out to one of those snapshots.

I guess that all boils down to how everything is a complete paradigm shift as to how to do anything. Even the most basic commands are… different. But even the most fundamental ways of doing things are upended. Understandably, there’s resistance to that. People get tossed out of their comfort zone.

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53

Considering the cost of membership I think it’s absolutely perfect.

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54

I know, right!
sb gave me a special discount for BLF.
I just pay him $49.95 per month, and I get to post as much as I want. :money_mouth_face:

55

Way to go! Now everybody’s gonna want that special price

1 Thank
56

:stuck_out_tongue:

57

Of course, no offense taken. Believe it or not I do appreciate the feedback. :wink:

Hmm, that shouldn’t happen. I just did a quick test by navigating to a different page while replying to you and then using the browser back button:

Actually what I was looking for was this screenshot from the FAQs, which is a feature that I quite like:

If you scroll back up to re-read something it will show you a marker to quickly return to the farthest point where you read in the thread:

Screenshot from 2023-03-26 08-41-17

Here are some other ways that it shows you where you were last at:

Notice how it highlights the thread I just clicked into when I go back to the Latest topics list:

And then when I enter that thread again it takes me to the next post after the last one I read and show a marker line for my last visit:

58

In the last pic, like where you’d see “1”, pencil, right-arrow, pic, “brad”, “18d”, it was the right-arrow that I thought would take me back to the source post, but it didn’t. Unno. Didn’t think much of it, no way to backtrack, so scroll-scroll-scroll. Couldda been a one-off thing, no idea.

Okay, just now, quick example of little impediments along the way…

Right now replying, the right-arrow thingy above-left of the textbox. Right-arrow, pic, “sb56637”. Hover over the right-arrow, the box “darkens”, but… what is it? No alt-text when hovering, unlike the ones on the above-right (fullpage, minimise). In the middle of a reply, I’m not about to click on it and lose what I’m typing, soooo… it just remains a mystery for now unless I do a dummy reply of “blah blah blah” then click it to see what happens.

That’s why hieroglyphs might be okay AFTER you’re familiar with what they do, but I don’t read ancient Sumerian, so have no idea what some of those might be. Like what’s the car-battery next to the smileyface? Oh… a calendar. And the mutant PacMan right next to that? An “en.composer.what.the.hell.is.even.that?”. Wut?

Yeah, just a quick example of little doodads you need to first find out what they are before being able to do anything with them.

59

Hmm you mean this one?

Screenshot from 2023-07-19 07-56-27

You’re correct that it’s supposed to show the source post, it does this for me:

Screenshot from 2023-07-19 08-00-13
Screenshot from 2023-07-19 08-00-13941×494 63.2 KB

Good catch, that button is indeed missing a description.

I don’t mean to be a Discourse shill, but it does have a cool feature where it saves drafts of what you were typing in the post composer.
https://budgetlightforum.com/my/activity/drafts)
image
It even syncs them to the BLF server and lets you pick up typing your post from where you left off even on another device.

Car battery! :smiley: At least that one does have a mouseover description. (I’ve actually never used that one, but it does have some pretty cool options for adding dates and times to posts, even recurring at certain intervals, and adjusted to the user’s timezone.)

Mutant PacMan… :laughing: Yes, that is a small bug in that plugin, the label doesn’t work right.

60

I voted for both of them. It took me some time to get used to the old system and it took some time to get used to the new one. I’m just beginning to ride without the sidewheels mounted on. So leave it as it is now.
One thing: straight going to the last post is a nice plus, but it takes me a looong time to get back to OP. Or am I doing something wrong?

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61

Hey there @Henk4U2 , really appreciate you making the effort to adjust to both of them!

Admittedly it’s not very obvious or discoverable, but you can just click here:

Screenshot from 2023-07-19 08-48-17

Or here on the post title:

image
image839×38 6.83 KB

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