Likes:
When you create a new topic, it brings up similar topics
It defaults to the Latest when I click on the Discourse link
Dislikes:
You have to go into your profile to log out
There’s no “Who’s online now” that I can find
Posts have to contain at least 20 characters
Title has to be at least 15 characters
I’ll continue to add stuff as I see them, and hope that others will point stuff out too. If someone finds out how to break the forum, I want to know!
I just created a group, or I think I did, but it doesn’t show up under Groups in the dashboard. Is this something that only admins should be able to do? If so, should it have given me an error message?
The minimum character requirements for titles and posts are adjustable (or can be disabled) in the admin console. The purpose, I suppose, is to encourage discussion as opposed to “me too”-ism. The “like” function is supposed to serve for the “me too” or “I agree” type posts.
The log-out thing I agree with—I suppose the devs don’t really intend folks to be logging on and off regularly. In fact, there’s a lot more stuff there that I’ve got turned off, like facebook & twitter account integration (Vanilla has some of this, too, now that I think about it).
The who’s online thing—definitely an omission. Since the forum software is regularly polling active users in order to display updates, you’d figure this wouldn’t be super-hard to implement. I’ll ask!
Banning’s definitely there—it’s in the admin panel, but not sure if it’s in the moderator one or not—but it’s kind of reactive. You can ban registered accounts, but not IP ranges or email addresses. WIll log that as a feature request!
I found where you can ban individual users. I just think it would be nice to pre-emptively ban or block known spammers before they have a chance to sign up.
You know how much I love those dishonest, slime sucking snail spawn.
Quite a bit of discussion on the Discourse meta forum on what to do about spam, including some comments by the HowToGeek admin, who’s running Discourse in production. Two threads:
It’s kind of a pain getting back to the “Latest” page if the thread you’re viewing is long. You have to either scroll to the top to get the link, or you have to click twice, once on the thread title to go to the top, THEN click on the bigdinosaur forums link. It would be nice if the menu included another link for the main page in addition to the category link.
You’re definitely not the first to bring that up. The way the forum devs appear to want to guide folks to new content is through the “Suggested Topics” box at the bottom, which will always display any unread messages. The way they’ve described it (and I’m having trouble finding a post on meta that shows this, but I know I’ve read it more than once) is that the “Suggested Topics” box is like the “prize” for reading through the thread. You’ve made it to the bottom, and you’re “rewarded” with some unread topics to click through to.
It doesn’t necessarily mesh with a structured approach to reading, through. The push seems to be toward a loosely-integrated overall “forum state,” where you manually track topics, and more toward an automatically managed “flow” of messages.
It sort of makes sense; I see the merit, even if it’s not how I normally read. For me, I hit “Latest” and then middle-click on everything I want to read, spawning new tabs for every new & unread discussion, and then I read each one through, replying as needed and closing the tab when done. This usually leaves me back with the single “Latest” tab open, and at then I can refresh and hit up messages that might have been posted while I was posting.
One more note, perhaps the most important one: the devs say that they are being very careful to not break the browser’s Back button, and that browser-based navigation should always work. So, if you clicked through from Latest to a topic, you should always be able to click the Back button (or just smack “Backspace” if your browser supports it) to be pulled back to Latest.
So if you use a federated login service (say Google, for example) to authenticate, but then change your name, e-mail, and login name to something other than the defaults, you can reach this really cool state where there is no way to log in to the site.
Discourse says my existing username (sig) is taken, but wouldn’t let me log into it. If I try to do federated login, it tries to create a new account. Fortunately, I’m still logged in on this browser on this computer, so I can try to change something.
That’s really interesting, though. I’m not sure what the expected recovery method there is, except to email another admin/mod and ask for your account’s details to be reset. That might work.
