I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord.
I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.
I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community.
I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
The first 3 points are something we hope to solve by making theming/configuration for new admins easier. Ideally I'd like to be in a place where those are all easily editable and Discourse can be as dense/sparse as you'd like!
Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
> Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
Highly agree of the timeline, a useful feature from someone who hates to read new +100 pages on a forum thread.
For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress.
Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge.
Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical.
I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback.
Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege.
I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge.
When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me.
In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value.
For me I think these concrete changes might help:
- Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved.
- Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics.
- Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
I've seen people allude to this lack of "geography" here and there, but this really thoughtfully frames the problem in a way I haven't seen before. Thanks for writing all that out. I don't have any immediate solutions/answers, but I will keep it in mind.
I think we also hear this a bit when people say they prefer "old" forums for unspecified reasons. Traditionally they're very top-down, you almost always enter through a category page... so you're naturally getting a feel for the taxonomy just by navigating to content. Discourse can also be configured this way, but it's very common for sites to default to the "latest" view, which can certainly feel like an endless stream of content.
Here's my feedback based on my experience using it, and using try.discourse.org as a specific case to examine.
- You use 73 vertical pixels after every. single. post. for just the reaction and permalink buttons. My browser's inner height is 947px when maximized, that means if I'm seeing the bottom of 4 posts, a full 30% of screen real estate for reading posts is dedicated to showing those buttons 4 times.
- Similarly, having the username and date sit above rather than beside each post, eats even more vertical space. I'm on the page because I want to read. the. thread., let me!
- If I scroll up too fast from the middle of a thread, I end up pulling down the top navbar, which, once the next set of posts loads, is immediately hidden again leading to the whole page jumping after each upward scroll.
- The first place it puts me is "Latest". I can't speak to the distribution of use-cases, but that's never been a helpful place to put me when I first land in a discourse. If I'm new, I want the lay of the land. And this is more true, the more busy the site is. So dropping me in "Categories" would be much more useful.
- Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
- A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
- Once you scroll the topic list, you lose the header, and no longer have a reference for which number is "Replies" and which is "Views". You've got tooltips at least, but it still lends to the overall sense of confusion and not knowing where one is.
- I want to see the name of the original poster of a topic in the list view. No being able to hover to find out is not sufficient because it's not glanceable.
- In the list view, there is no visual distinction between the original poster, frequent posters, and the most recent poster. Original poster as first is fine, but it took me about 30 seconds bouncing around various icons and waiting for the hover to finally figure out that the last one is always the most recent poster. I thought that maybe for really popular threads it was only showing frequent posters.
- It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
- You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
- try.discourse.org in particular has a category "Uncategorized", but there are topics that have no category, not even "Uncategorized". Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
- I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
I sincerely hope this helps to improve my own experience when using discourse one day, but from what I've seen in investigating this, I suspect the level of minimalism in place is done on purpose, despite the negative impact on discoverability and usability, in which case basically everything I said will be dismissed since it's not what you're aiming for, or at least you don't think it is.
I really appreciate the time you spent writing this feedback. A lot of the time someone will say "I hate Discourse" and never offer anything substantial.
I'm not going to respond to everything here, but I just want you to know that it doesn't mean I think it's invalid or dismissible. I really do enjoy reading this stuff.
I also don't have the power internally to say "we're doing this now" but I do keep this stuff in mind when weighing in on new features or refactors.
> Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
Yes, it's kind of both. We call it a "timeline," which I guess puts the emphasis on time... but it's tracking how far you've progressed through the topic. You can drag it around to jump to a specific post or point in time.
> A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
I'd prefer this too... to a point. There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
> It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles. We have a few different category/tag styles that admins can configure, but if 90% of sites never change those... then it doesn't really matter... making the options for configuring this kind of thing more apparent is something we hope to improve soon.
>You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
ctrl+f is definitely a common gripe... we try to be smart about it, but the inconsistency may not be worth it in the end.
Essentially we try to avoid hijacking browser search unless we think we can do a better job. Within topics, if there are a small number of posts and they're all on screen at once, we'll use browser search. If it's a long topic and not all the posts are available, we use our search because it searches all the posts in the topic, not just what's on the current "page" of infinite scrolling.
You can also hit ctrl+f a second time to get to browser search, but it's not discoverable and as evidenced by this reply... this is overly complex to explain.
> Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
Good point. We should probably eliminate the color for Uncategorized unless we're using it elsewhere. Admins can optionally turn on the ability to always show "Uncategorized" with the color under uncategorized topic titles... but unless that setting is enabled we should suppress the color everywhere.
> I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
Yes, I agree here 100%. I've raised this a couple times and we're slowly getting there. We actually already have the UI, but need some more work to make it the default for tags. You can see it in action by visiting a URL like https://try.discourse.org/tags/intersection/test/art
You're right that by default we lean towards being more minimal, but we know that's not what everyone wants. One of the longer term objectives we're starting to work on is making it easier for admins to easily change the appearance when they're setting up a new site. There's a lot we can change within our theming system, but at the moment it's not very approachable for the average admin and too many sites look very "default." I'd like to see more different looking Discourse sites that cater to their specific audiences, with different information density, hierarchy, structure, etc... and hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
>There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
With a fixed width like you have, you could probably calculate height upon submission and just have an accumulating cache of total thread height per thread.
As far as it not working in the extreme case, I'll point out it basically doesn't work in any case right now. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles.
Bold was just an easy example. There's all kinds of ways you could make them differentiated beyond what appears to be the width of a double space between them. You could underline one, italicize, change the font size, change the color, put a '|' between them, put a box around each tag, etc. It's a design challenge, but hardly an insurmountable one.
> hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
I hope so too that one day landing on a discourse page when looking for information doesn't elicit an eyeroll from me. Clearly there's a talented team, and I wish you the best of luck.
I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting.
I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore.
Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums!
They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app than a good-old website.
It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and fanciness.
I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat, but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one - took forever. And the result didn't run very fast.
After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.
I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a prefab droplet.
It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.
phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse made, there could have been a chance.
Forums do indeed have terrible UX… but it says a lot that they still compare favourably to what we have today, in many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes) slightly easier to use (once you know how), but with no instructions.
People don't read instructions. If you need instructions on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
[b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like that out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i]italic[/i]… had to be told how to do that. Does that make Hacker News particularly bad?)
“Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).
we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience
That's why your example of needing tags to bold text is an excellent example of shitty UX. A WYSIWYG editor where you click the Bold option to enable it, and click it again to disable it would be much better.
But that means hidden state. If I quote somebody, I can see how they produced their markup in BBcode, but in WYSIWYG I can't see which icon button to press.
Quite funny, because when bbs became the norm, the old generation was quite vocal on how bad they are because of their flow-style discussions. At that time, Usenet and mailing lists were the norm, which had thread-like style, like this forum or reddit.
Discourse can also be accessed as a mailing list (for those lamenting its use of JS, etc.). Not sure if it requires any different setup, but that's how I interact with the Nix Discourse, for example.
I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I’d recommend it if you need this kind of solution.
well, the gaming forums of RockPaperShotguns (video game news website), built on Discourse, are set to close next month, so it's less a technological choice and more how much the maintainer/owner of the forum wants to keep it online
Weren't they the ones whining a few years ago about how people insisting on using Android phones (as opposed to wonderfully performant iPhones) were threatening their plans for a glorious JS-only full client-side rendering future?
[0]: https://discourse.org/