Main points
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
Moving on, now let’s click into a thread.
4. Timestamp of each individual post
5. Threaded replies
6. Quoting previous posts.
- 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 @
And some miscellaneous notes
8. There seems to be no indication of which threads have been read.
9. Notifications
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
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:
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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 don't have so much time to read right now but I'm posting to make sure I can find it tomorrow.
I'm sure this feedback will be taken into account to some point
Marc, I really do appreciate the time you put into this post. Believe me when I say this is very helpful. Like Oscar, I will spend more time digesting over the next day.
I'm not a long-time community member so I hope you don't mind my feedback:
Give users more control to customize app behavior. |
@graham_howe wrote:I'm not a long-time community member so I hope you don't mind my feedback:
Certainly not, thank you.
4. 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.
I think it might be one of those things where you don't understand how good of an improvement it really is, until you use it for a long time, then all of a sudden it's no longer available.
7. Partially Agree
- I think you are probably being a bit picky on this one to be honest.
😀
I actually tried to mention a bunch of people in my post, instead of just Andrew, but I just gave up because it was being so difficult. But yah, a relatively minor point.
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The quoting that I just did here, super painful. Especially as it tried to re-number the bullet points. 😞
Good detailed compilation and comparison @Marc_Dillon
I am sure @AndrewB and team are working on the feedback. For example when I type "@" , now the names of members who have contributed in the current thread previously pop up first. So it is nice that @AndrewB and team are receptive and implementing the feedback.
@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!
Even if this community improves in the future, I don't think it will have any improvements comparable to Discourse. Apparently, Google cloud, Google workspace, and CTO connect use the same platform. I guess all of those platforms would be affected if any changes were made. There is a good chance that we'll have to adjust to what Google offers us.
Additionally, all communities have the same managers. In old website @Steve used to manage questions. The community isn't managed by AppSheet PRO here. It is a huge disadvantage.
From the previous Community, I lost many messages and bookmarks. I would have at least made a backup of all that if I knew that. However, I have no idea what to do now. Trying to find the same things in this community is not easy at all. The search function doesn't seem to work properly. I use it anyway.
This list is so demoralizing.
It's so very frustrating that the Google team has to learn for themselves all of the lessons the Discourse team already has. Years of progress ignored. I am so sorely tempted to walk away for good.
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!