The UI glitches, splitting into subforums…is annoying but not the end of the world
IMO, what is very sad
a) previous threads that were brought forward lost proper quoting and have comments made by one person attributed to another. For me, this is REALLY bad. This AM someone 'liked" a post I made months ago. I went to look at it and I see a pile of text, attributed to me that I never wrote.
b) the fact that so many threads did not make the transition
The gold of this site was the wealth of information. Part missing, part mangled information is the bigger issue.
I specifically asked an admin about this and got nothing. It doesn’t sound like it’s a big priority.
To be fair, following a conversation in the old forum wasn’t easy sometimes depending on the user. Not everyone would use the quote feature and would just continue to hit reply. And when there were multiple pages, you had to manually go back to find the post that person was reply to.
At least with the new forum, if you reply to a post, users can click on the upper right of the post and it will automatically show you to the post that user replied to.
1.) That’s enabled. These were all different IP addresses.
2.) We’re looking into.
3.) See #2.
4.) There is a rate limit on. Only reason we weren’t hammered more.
5.) Probably, yes.
No, the old forum had none of the above. You know what it had, which we just re-enabled? Manual approval by an admin before being allowed to post.
I hate it. Most of the reasons I’ve already been stated above. I just want to know where I need to send my physical therapy bills from my thumb injury from having to scroll so much now because there’s way too much space between every post.
This information IS there. When you look at the list of threads in one of the forums you will see five avatar circles to the right of the thread. The left most one is who started the thread and the one furthest to the right is the most recent poster. The three avatar circles in the middle represent frequent posters in the thread.
So this information is there however just a little more difficult to identify (I personally think the avatars make it more difficult but the info is there). The usernames were easier.
Oh well, good, but what if the person you’re replying to has posted 10 times in the same thread. You don’t know which post it is unless you go back and look, which is a pain. This is probably a bigger issue in the lavender room.
You shouldn’t have to go back and forth. If you click the upper right, it will automatically show you the post they replied to. Now if the person is replying to the wrong post, there isn’t much you can do. But that’s always been the case.
I would love to see the equivalent of what was the “back to forum” button at the end of the last post. Currently, after reaching the end of a thread my workflow is to click “triathlon forum” from the column on the left and then click “latest” after landing on that page.
I know. But it is very poorly presented. Every other forum platform I have ever used shows this in clear text by the thread. So, when scrolling through a list of threads (which requires a lot more scrolling, by the way), I would also have to hover over two bubbles on every thread to decide if I want to drive into them. That is a crappy UX.
I’m happy about the changes. I’ve avoided Slowtwitch for the longest time, mainly due to the reputation this site has, but also because of the archaic turn of the century forum software it ran on. Discourse isn’t perfect, but it’s modern and familiar and in pretty common use nowadays (e.g. TrainerRoad and Zwift use it for their forums too). I’m sure there’s room for improvement, but I’m also sure it’ll be easier to make those improvements on Discourse than on phpBB or whatever the previous system was.
I hate it and it has diminished my usage of the forum. I don’t like how I can’t jump to the last post easily, the ultrafractionation of the forum doesn’t help either.
