Feedback on Discourse (this forum software)

[codinghorror]

Hi, I’m Jeff Atwood, CEO and founder of Discourse – that’s the forum software you’re using right now!

First, I wanted to refer you to our handy tips and tricks blog post, just in case … it’s got a lot of fundamentals that you may or may not know about. A good starting point. (Oh yeah, and press ? to see our keyboard shortcuts.)

After participating for a month or so, I also wanted to have an open discussion here about Discourse, the forum software:

• what do you like about it?
• what don’t you like about it?
• what could be improved?

Consider this an opportunity to share feedback with someone who is not only a retro gamer, but also wants your community to have amazing software that helps you… in the words of Spock, “live long and prosper!”

[codinghorror]

Don’t all reply at once!

Could be that everything is just peachy and that’s fine by me; if you think of anything that could be improved, feel free to reply.

[matt]

Hi Jeff!

I really love Discourse. I’ve had this reply as draft since you posted. I must have got distracted. It happens.

From time to time I report bugs at meta, but really Discourse is very good and I don’t know if or how I’d change it.

With regards to this site we don’t have the same full screen editor as there is on meta. I’m not sure why that is. I guess it could be easier for me to figure that stuff out when I see different discourses all looking and feeling slightly different. How do I know what’s normal and what can be added? And how would I request for mods to be installed by the admin of unknown experience doing that sort of thing?

The discourse hub app, that wraps the websites, is… fine. I know there’s another client that takes a native approach but I’m not into subscription software so I’ve only briefly tried it. So I guess this would be my main request for improvement. A better, more native app.

Thanks to you and the team for all your work on this.

[poptart]

I know you’ve said it’s not going to happen like 1000 times, but the option to have pages would be great.

[codinghorror]

@matt

we don’t have the same full screen editor as there is on meta

Huh, can you screenshot? Do you mean mobile, or desktop? On desktop, the full screen editor is the little arrow indicator at top right, e.g

Then we’re full screen (here’s me sizing the browser to make it easier to see)

You gotta press ctrl+enter to save at that point, or press the button again to reverse to the bottom-docked editor.

There’s also a keyboard shortcut, visible if you press ?, which is apparently shift+f11? It does seem to work! I’m not a fullscreen editor kind of guy, but everything seems to work as designed, but again… I’m on desktop/laptop.

[raskulous]

Hmm, speaking of editors, it would be really useful to fullscreen the editor on mobile. This little window is too small sometimes.

[matt]

Yes, this is what I mean.

I’ll check my desktop browser settings as I may be running that in mobile mode.

[codinghorror]

It is full screen on iOS; see screenshot. I will need to test on my Android devices

All I did was be in Mobile Safari and press Reply…

[codinghorror]

Aha this is different on Android here is a screenshot

Not sure why…

[codinghorror]

OK! We will get this inconsistency resolved between iOS and Android soon. Note that you can always minimize the editor to multi quote and such via the chevron button ⌄ at top right.

(also if you want a bit more room in the meantime, press the ☰ button to hide the editor toolbar)

[matt]

I run RGB in Flotato (site specific browser app) and I had it set to mobile which meant I was missing a whole bunch of user interface elements.

Whilst I really quite like running mobile on desktop, I’ve disabled it to be able to get better text composer options.