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Main points
- In general, I feel that the same information takes much more effort to see than in the Discourse community. This means more clicks, more page navigation, less information per page, etc.
- Most contributors are volunteering their time. In such cases, convenience, ease of finding information, and fluidity of navigation are actually huge factors. Small changes to any of them can easily stop a volunteering member from using the community all-together.
Here is my detailed list of feedback points. Most of them are basic comparisons to what we had in the Discourse community. I saw that quickchart.io had just created a new Discourse community, and I happen to have it open so that’s where this first comparison screenshot is from.
Here is the “home” page of a Discourse community. (or rather, the “Categories” page, which is what Appsheet’s Discourse always defaulted to). At 100% browser zoom.
By contrast, here is the home page of the new Google Cloud Community. Also at 100% browser zoom.
Differences
- Number of visible topics:
- Discourse: there are only 4 topics in that community, which are easily shown, with plenty of room to spare, for at least 8 topics to be visible at once.
- GCommunity: one single topic is visible from the start. Even if I scroll down, it can only fit 3 on one page.
- Notes
- Discourse wins at first glance. It is easier to see more posts from the beginning.
- Although if you want to see more on Discourse than what is shown on the first page, you have to click a button at the bottom, which takes you to a different page with a different layout.
- GCommunity’s method of loading more, on-demand (via button click), at the bottom of the page, and seemingly infinitely, seems much better.
- I do like how GCommunity has the categories at the top of the page instead of on the left side of the main page. I didn’t click on these categories very often in Discourse.
- Extra points to GCommunity for having special announcement posts on the right side, right on top. This is great. Maybe we can add more sections on the right side, below the announcements, for other things, like stickied topics? (like a “read me before posting” !)
- The top portion of the GCommunity home page is nice, but most of it is not information that you’re going to want to be looking at every single time you open the community. I think it’d be better as part of a different page, and not be included in the default home page, with the possible exception of the prominent search bar.
- Information Available:
- Discourse:
- topic title
- number of replies
- amount of time since most recent activity
- tags (if there are any, none are displayed in above screenshot)
- GCommunity
- avatar of original poster
- topic title
- preview of body
- number of likes
- number of replies
- number of views
- tags
- name of original poster
- category
- amount of time since most recently activity
- Notes
- There are two conflicting goals here really. One is to have plenty of information available from here, without having to click into a thread. The other is to not distract from the more important details, by adding in lots of less important details. I’d say neither community is “perfect” in my opinion, but Discourse is far better.
- Personally, I’d like to see these 5 data points, and nothing else, from the first page.
- topic title
- number of replies
- time since most recent activity
- avatar of most recent poster
- smaller avatar list of all posters
- The list of information available on the first page should only show what is necessary to decide whether to click into the post.
- Number of views and number of likes seems pointless at this point to me. Especially when you hide the much more important ‘number of replies’ in between them.
- Most recent poster is hugely helpful for those like me who can offer assistance. If I see that some other knowledgeable contributor has just posted, I often won’t even open the topic because I can trust that the other contributor is helping out sufficiently. It is also a great way to easily see who has recently been active in the community.
- Showing the original poster can be helpful, perhaps this could be added to my list above. However the current way actually lists them twice, the avatar once, and their name. This is redundant and takes up space.
- Showing the preview of the body, and any tags on the topic, I think is too much information here, and just serves to take up space unnecessarily.
- The category could also be helpful, but this can be majorly improved I think. In Discourse, the categories were color-coded. Bring this back, this was so easy to see!
- Time since most recent activity is another very important detail, it should be shown much more prominently.
- Major take-aways so far:
- GCommunity does have some cool features on the home page, yay!
- Let’s get the information condensed, the important details made more prominent, and get rid of the less important details.
- Colors and icons (avatars) make things much easier to read quickly. Utilize that fact.
- Topics should take up less vertical space.
Moving on, now let’s click into a thread.
4. Timestamp of each individual post
- Discourse: defaults to the super easy-to-read relative time. 15mins, 1hr, 1d, 2d, Mar ‘21. Did I mention easy-to-read?
- GCommunity: Shows the full date and time.
- Notes
- Wow, full date-time just takes foooorrrreeeevvvvver to read. Absolutely terribly difficult to quickly see when individual posts were posted. Even after changing the setting to show “relative dates”, it does not change it within the threads themselves. Please change this ASAP, this one is huge! This is an extremely important detail to see when replying to a post.
- In Discourse, clicking on the relative date shows a simple pop-up of the actual date-time, if needed (as well as a permalink to that specific post, and sharing options).
5. Threaded replies
- Please no! Get rid of this completely.
- On social media, threaded replies are great, conversations can go many different directions.
- On a technical help forum, conversations, and information flow, is almost always extremely linear. Threaded responses only work to hide certain details from other posters in the thread.
- To make the matter worse, we’re given settings where each person can change the way the threaded replies look, and in what order they are shown. So the same post can look different to different people.
- Again, Discourse gets it right. You can still reply directly to a specific post, but your post goes to the bottom of the thread, and with a little link to the replied-to post, and causes a more “directed” notification to the person you replied to, almost like mentioning them with @.
- Please get rid of threaded replies completely, as well as all of the setting options. Yes, I said this twice
6. Quoting previous posts.
- Discourse: super easy to quote a section of a previous post.
- Simply highlight the section, and a little pop-up button for “quote” appears.
- Already writing a post and want to include a quote in a specific spot? Easy. Put your cursor in the targeted spot in your post, and repeat the above.
- GCommunity: way too difficult
- You only get the quote option from the one single post that you’ve clicked “reply” on, or the original post if you didn’t click reply on a specific one.
- It also automatically quotes the entire post, you must manually delete everything else.
- I’m not even seeing if it is even possible to quote from more than one other post at once?
- Notes
- Another one where Discourse wins by a mile.
- It’s like traveling back in time here, to forum technology from many years ago.
- Using multiple quotes, and responding directly in-line, point by point, to someone else’s post, and even multiple other posts, is often the best way to thoroughly and concisely respond to someone’s long post, and is the easiest for everyone to read.
- This isn’t the biggest deal, but it does have a large effect on the quality of responses.
- I can imagine how replicating Discourse’s quoting functionality here may not even be possible without completely remaking the entire system that this community’s website is made from. Which is unfortunate. Perhaps you can simply add the ability to apply a quote formatting, to a section of highlighted text within a draft response. Like is possible in many other forum systems. Here’s an example:
- When the “Quote” button is clicked (or a new separate button), the highlighted text gets a quote formatting applied to it, so it looks like a quote once posted.
- (also notice how the quote icon is displaying on my end, like an unrecognized unicode symbol)
7. Mentioning other users with @
- Discourse: the participants in the current thread are listed first in the pop-up dropdown. There may even be other sorting going on, like most frequent participants in the community.
- GCommunity: does not seem to apply any sorting to the pop-up dropdown, besides alphabetical. A minor thing, but is significantly less convenient.
And some miscellaneous notes
8. There seems to be no indication of which threads have been read.
9. Notifications
- Discourse: click on upper-right to quickly and easily see all notifications and their details. From there, clicking on one takes you to the post in question, and marks the notification as read.
- GCommunity: From any page, you can just see the number of notifications. You have to navigate to another thread to see the details. Then there doesn’t really seem to be any way to mark notifications and read/unread.
- Discourse wins by a mile here.
10. There are no pop-up desktop notifications. Not a huge deal, but it was nice to see those and be able to reply to someone immediately when I was available and at the computer.
11. Discourse showed a little message at the top, indicating when there were new or updated posts. In GCommunity, it seems that a frequent user would have to be constantly refreshing the entire page every now and then to see if there are new posts.
12. The Feature Release page is fantastic! Very helpful to be able to see all details of all feature releases in one long page, sorted by most recent. And easy to search.
13. Likes
- Discourse
- You can only see who has liked your own posts. All other posts you can only see the total number of likes.
- But on your own post, clicking the like button quickly and easily shows you the avatars of who all liked your post (with their names on hover text)
- GCommunity
- You are able to see who all has liked a post, on anybody’s post. This is an upgrade. I’m not sure why this information was withheld on Discourse?
- However, you have to navigate to another page if you want to see the list of people. Another page navigation, there are far too many of those in the new community.
14. In general, we seem to have to perform more full page navigations to get to the same amount of information. I’m not a web designer, so I don't know the technical terms/details, but Discourse seems to be able to more dynamically display information to the user, without having them navigate to a completely different page. This is exacerbated by the fact that full page navigation seems to be a bit slower on GCommunity than on Discourse.
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Recommendations for other long-time community members who may want to reply to this post:
- Please feel free to add any additional numbered points. Try to clearly and concisely describe how each community handles the thing in question, and which one is better and why.
- If you wish to simply and quickly agree or disagree to any points, maybe post something along these lines, to keep things organized?
“
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Hope this helps!
@AndrewB
Edit:
Side-Note: the editor allows you to select "hidden" borders for an HTML table, but then when trying to post it tells you that it is invalid HTML.
I'm not a long-time community member so I hope you don't mind my feedback:
- Agree
- Partially Agree
- I would keep number of likes, replies and views so long as they are small icon/count format
- Agree
- Partially agree
- I don't have a major issue with dates being show, but the setting preference should work so that we can decide to see relative dates.
- Agree
- And you didn't ask for it enough times! Threaded replies in a help forum are just plain idiotic, but to allow personal preference so that people see the same post in different ways makes it even worse.
- Agree
- And can we please bring back an easier way of referencing other posts or including links from the help documentation. I have a little snippet of html that I store in Notepad++ so I can relatively quickly create something like this, but it still takes a lot of cutting and pasting:
Give users more control to customize app behavior.
- Partially Agree
- I think you are probably being a bit picky on this one to be honest.
- Agree
- Agree
- Partially Agree
- Not really a big deal for me.
- Agree
- This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the body preview was removed from the views. If you're away from the page for a while and refresh there is a good chance you completely lose your place as well now.
- Agree
- To be fair though I don't use this a great deal, perhaps because I'm a recent user.
- Partially Agree
- It's interesting, but actually the like notification popup is usually where I notice a like anyway.
- Agree
@Suvrutt_Gurjar wrote:
when I type "@" , now the names of members who have contributed in the current thread
Interesting. Same for me:
But if I type the first letters of your name:
Not sorted anymore.
@Marc_Dillon Thank you!
- 15. I wanted to reply in detail to your points, but I would have to keep scrolling back and forth between this reply box and your post, which is extremely difficult on mobile view. In Discourse, you have the reply box fixed at the bottom of the screen, while you can scroll freely through the thread. Here you cannot. So I’ll wait till I can use my computer so that I could open two navigator windows side by side.
- 16. The reply box on mobile view is toooo small, only four lines are visible and you cannot expand it.
- 17. Did you notice? I had to put my numbered list in bullets, because in mobile view you cannot have numbered list. Actually mobile view has only five buttons: Bold, Italic, Bullets, Link and Image.
Aftear reading this I can say the following:
I'm with you on all the point you have made about the things GCC does on a worst way than Discourse.
I miss other ones like the links previews, Leaderboard, Markdown, Keyboard shortcuts, edits count, etc. I made a post on a topic that was seen by some of you.
About the points you said are better or good on this new platform, I'm not sure if I feel the same, but that's about it.
BTW: You can see who have clicked Like to posts/replies on Discourse by clicking on the number of likes
If I have some spare time I'll make a topic with my list of things to do better, although most of it is the same you posted and we already discoused it with @AndrewB.
Also I'm looking forward for @WillowMobileSys's feedback!
