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First opinions from an infrequent reddit and forum user

Yisery·9/17/2013, 11:10:20 PM·3 votes·2,082 views

So, I'd like to begin with that I already wanted to give feedback about this discussion style thing when it was still in PBE (months ago I think), but apparently even though I had an account, I also had own a summoner to write stuff about the forum. I won't talk about why I didn't create a PBE summoner, but it kinda set me off and I couldn't do anything about it.

Anyway, I'll begin with myself, so that you can understand my point of view and the situation I'm in. Firstly, I don't use forums (or reddit) often. I occasionally browse reddit but this only started about a week ago. I did use quite a few forums up till now and I also made several posts in the LoL forum.

This is what I like about this new thing:

  • Markdown
    Yes, Markdown is cool and I like it. Never will I have to write all the [] BBCodes again, asides form links (which are apparently not supported here). Hopefully.
  • The "Red Tracker"
    I like that a discussion/thread shows when it has a red post in it. I also like the red post quick few on the right sidebar, it helps finding important things. And I like that they are hotlinked.
  • HOT and RECENT view
    Discussions are usually about a single topic. If the discussion proceeds, eventually a new discussion emerges. When I just want to read some quick stuff on a topic I can view the hot mode, when I want to read everything (which makes more sense if in chronological order) I can also do that.
  • The preview is fast and responsive.
  • The font choice
    Yeah, they're simple and easy to read. Except for the default font in the edit textarea, but that's another thing (probably per-browser).

What I don't like:

  • The sidebar is pretty huge
    There's much space wasted by the sidebar which instead could be used for content, especially for comments. Ususally you don't want to read text over a width of 1000px, but 600px is just not that much nowadays with all the FHD and HighDPI displays.
  • I can't specify if the RECENT view should be ascending. Forums used to display the oldest post or comment first, this thing does exactly the opposite.
  • My choice for RECENT and HOT is not saved. I'd like it to bow before my options, not requiring me to default to one thing all the time when I open a discussion for the first time.
  • I want to be notified
    In the new ages of interwebz there are so many places you can go and so many things going on. You can't track everything immediately, thus you need something like a notification area that shows you whenever something of interest happens. Namely: I want to be notified when someone replies to a comment or a new comment is created to a discussion I find interesting, or a new comment has been added to a certain mini-discussion (a new sub-comment). Opt-in of course.
    I am currently monitoring three threads in the main forum, awaiting a reply, and I always have to check them in order to check that I did not miss it. Imagine this for 10 threads.
  • The edit textarea is too small
    As you can probably imagine, writing this much text in a textarea of 566x190px is not that easy. I'm okay with the default size and I'm also okay with it not automatically resizing when my entered text exceeds the default dimensions. But please allow me to manually rezise it if I need it. Current browsers usually allow this for arbitrary text elements, but not here.

And finally, I'd like to ask something about the comment view: If I choose RECENT instead of BEST, what does that actually care about? What determines if a thread is more recent than another? By the top-level comment or by the latest sub-comment? Also, if I already read all amount of comments on a page and there have been new ones since the last time, how do I get only those? Will they be on top, or do I have to crawl entire comment-threads to find the newest and unread comment? This is a real bummer for me in reddit.

That's it for now. I've been using this only for a few minutes now but I hope you can get something out of my first impressions.

7 Comments

Pendragon9/20/2013, 5:04:22 PM3 votes

Super helpful comments! I'll share them with the team.

Yisery9/17/2013, 11:13:42 PM2 votes

I was running out of characters (couldn't extend the post any longer), so here is the last thing that didn't make it into the OP:

Also, if you have some time, would you might checking out my feedback for the currently used forum software over at http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=41152682 ? It doesn't seem to get much recognition but there are no real forum feedback areas for things like that. Actually, a few things have already been covered here.

And something I just noticed while writing this comment:
It seems you are actually auto-resizing the edit textarea when I enter text. However, the first line is always invisible when typing at the bottom, meaning that the whole pane is at least one line to short.

I'm experiencing the same thing at github and it might be something with the browser (FF24 here), but it's kinda annoying.

Ghost Edit²: for some reason this works now. :S

Thanks for reading all this if you managed to get this far.

Edit: I also pointed over to http://www.discourse.org/ in another comment you probably already read. I really like the decisions made there in many aspects (even some I mentioned here) and it's still actively being developed.

Riotjmccaffrey9/21/2013, 8:01:33 AM1 votes

Awesome feedback,

Quick question regarding notifications, did you check out the "My Updates" section in the top right? That page should show you an overview of every reply that has been made that you haven't read. Also the number next to it shows how many there are so you can tell at a glance if there are new replies that you need to read.

EDIT:

Also Recent is interesting, it sorts all "levels" by time. So the top level "threads" are sorted by time and the replies at each level are sorted by time.

For example if I have comments posted in numerical order, this is how they might look in Recent:

  • 5
  • 2
    • 7
    • 6
  • 1
    • 4
    • 3

On the old forums you would see them as:

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7

The reason we do not do this currently is because its hard to understand post #3 without reading #1 (its parent). For this reason, we keep the parent-to-child relationship while still showing them in the order that they were posted.

I hope this helps