I feel like having the front page show the latest posts is confusing and overwhelming to new users. Showing the categories rather than the latest posts will
a) make users feel more at home in a more traditional forum layout and
b) facilitate finding posts interesting and relevant to the user. Users can always click on “Latest” if they wish to view the latest posts from all categories.
Perhaps even add an user setting for the user’s preferred home page.
I agree, but disagree at the same time. Maybe combine the two? Add the ‘Latest’ to the category list. Not that it is really a category so that you can’t post only in Latest. Well… You get the point.
As someone who just joined, I can say that having to search around for categories was confusing. As it is now, it looks like a hashtag system rather than a forum, which is not nearly as intuitive. Having an expanded list of categories (rather than a tiny drop-down menu) would do wonders.
This wouldn’t be a change meant for those of you who have been here, but for new members to more easily become acquainted with the site.
I personally prefer the idea of Categories rather than a Latest Posted design. It’d be even better to have a category for the latest at the very top so that IF we had people who preferred to use the former, then they can.
To me, just doing an unorganized “Latest Posted and Replied” system seems unethical, unprofessional and just creates another obstacle for the user have to go through to get to an older post he/she wishes to view. What if the administrative staff wish to pin a few more things to the top? You’d have to scroll past them before you hit what you want.
There should be a General area for Topics labeled Meta, then there should be an area to access everything Minecraft and Sponge related.
I understand wanting to branch out and use something other than Xenforo, but it doesn’t mean we can’t allow people to more easily search for exactly what they want rather than dive into a world full of hay and pray that they find their needle.
I’ll put my views across on here, as I might as well. I’ve had enough time to think about it and have come to the conclusion that I don’t really like discourse in the form of a forum. What I’m saying here is from a user standpoint; as I can’t change the default operation of the forum, all I can base this post on is first-hand experience with using it.
Discourse isn’t really a good representation of what an online forum should be like. What is that? Well, a forum is a message board for holding discussions about a particular subject. Almost every online forum has a collection of sub-forums which aim to organize the content into categories. The key word here being “organize”; when I look at discourse, I don’t see that:
There’s too much clashing information being displayed on one page. It feels more like siphoning through hundreds of emails you don’t want to read because they don’t appeal to you. And that kind of reflects the platform as a whole, when I see “There are 8 unread and 18 new topics remaining”. As a user, I don’t care about new, unread, top or suggested topics. I only care about topics if they appeal to me.
My next issue is the endless scrolling content. It tells me that discourse is trying too hard to be something it shouldn’t be. If you were reading a book, would you rather have it as one extremely long page, or 300 pages of equal size?
Personally, Xenforo is an excellent platform - it does what it does best and nothing more. Everything is categorized neatly into their own sub-forums. Stickies are clear and concise at the top of the page. The forum isn’t an endless scrolling page. The search feature works just fine. Everything feels connected to the overall topic of the forums. Why change what doesn’t need changing? Why use something new over something that already works well?
In hindsight, topic and post bookmarking is really useful. Everything else feels too simple, modernized and flat. That’s even what the description of discourse is, in a nutshell.
You can favorite a post to “bookmark” it. Everything is categorized into sub-forums. The discourse search feature works fine for me. I personally prefer the endless scrolling to digging through pages of replies, though it would be nice if it was optional. Notifications are realtime, no need to reload the page. You can close a post or reply you’re composing and come back to it and anytime, or browse the forums with it open. Tagging people in posts is easy and the forums themselves are responsive. I really think a lot of the dislike for discourse stems from the frontpage being Latest rather than Categories.
