I have an issue with the New feature in the menu. It shows all new posts across the entire forum. Right now, it’s currently showing 65 new posts for me. As this becomes the primary forum though, that number is going to increase exponentially quickly become meaningless.
While I’m sure it might be useful for some people, I don’t think it needs to be feature so prominently.
What I think might be more useful, is the ability to flag particular categories and receive notice when there are new posts in the flagged categories.
Anyone want to tell me why I’m wrong on this? Feedback / trolls welcome.
This also works for a thread, but it’s found underneath the OP and a the bottom of the thread:
Notifications automatically enable by default on threads you’ve interacted with, you can configure this in your preferences - a manual change on a thread takes priority over the automatic selection.
A lot of this design was informed by lessons learned while developing StackExchange, There, the developers had focused on limiting or eliminating discussion to improve signal to noise. Discourse on the other hand, was designed to promote healthy discussion.
Those aren’t “best practices” as much as they are “that’s the way it’s always been done”. Discourse was designed with a clean slate approach. The full name of the software “civilized discourse creation toolkit” speaks a lot to the mindset of the developers - ignore the way other forums do things and make the best platform possible for everyone, including people who would never participate in a forum before.
The amount of pain and “i hate change” is directly proportional to how much you’ve used other forums, and it does go away after a while. Give it time, having used Discourse for a while now, it feels like a leaps and bounds improvement over other forum software and even over Reddit and Facebook, but at first, it was awkward and painful. to me.
Yeah now that I know how the notifications controls work I already like it better. I still need to play around with the different options for create posts as far as the different tools available.
Funny thing, that’s almost the very same debate ground as the original forum revamp. There too the drama came with the trenches of “who is it about” and “who is it for”. In the end, after many iterations, CCP finally figured out it is never about the developer or the designer, but about the user.
Don’t ask or force the user to adapt, provide guiding paths not tresholds and triggers. And never ever give the image of pushing things through. EVE Online isn’t a product, it’s a service model highly dependant on narrative and communicative energy - without this, all the retention/acquisition marketing becomes a rat race. There’s better ways, as fortunately CCP has learned after several glitches.
Yet for some reason where it comes to concepts of web and art, things always flow harsly and from the top, only to end up not working as well as intended.
In an age where media are designed to stimulate inward bound communicative behaviour - for example reddit - the better approach is not to focus blindly on theoretical concepts, but to reinforce what works on a behavioural level. Like it or not, every place using this service performs quite ill when facing third party communication streams - which is fine if we’re taling support or product messaging. But it is a very bad business practice for any services model.
