General discussion about Discourse, the software that powers our website. Help triaging concrete requests for TSMN is welcome.
This topic started as a split from Hello federated world!, which might explain the context missing in some posts.
@icaria36 @luka
Had a look at the forum (on an iPad FWIW). Seems.like a busy place already!
Maybe somebody can make a simple FAQ explaining the logic behind the UI, because to old folk like me, it still comes across as a giant, overwhelming firehose of posts, and I always seem 1 click away of losing whatever little bit of control I thought I had over what I was seeing, and being totally and utterly lost.
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@icaria36 @luka
The entire point of a forum it seems to me, is to have a place to discuss certain topics in depth, and especially being able to find and refer back to these discussions easily, which is where this UI totally fails for me.
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@sknob@mamot.fr Old folk also struggled in the earlier days keeping up with busy forums, BBS, Usenet, listservsā¦ isnāt it? 
Especially on the first minutes after landing in a new discussion place. But the internet was younger and we were curious and eager to learn.
Anyway, any human space with hundreds of individuals willing to discuss dozens of topics without a central conductor telling them what to discuss where is going to be a tad messy. And beautiful.
This forum allows logged in users to get special notifications from the discussions they have participated in or they have subscribed to. It also allows to ignore and even mute (remove from your sight) any categories or tags you are not interested about. If you are interested in only a couple of discussions, you can subscribe to email notifications from these (as we did in the glorious days of phpBB) and deprioritize the rest.
The federation to Mastodon is great, but people following from outside the forum miss these features. Itās like joining a workshop via videoconference. It is great compared to having nothing, especially if you couldnāt travel because of family duties, visa declinedā¦ but the experience wonāt be as good as sharing the physical room (and the corridors, the kitchenette, the dinner, the local tourā¦) with the rest of participants. The difference is that joining the forum takes one minute and two clicks. 
EDIT: still learning whether mentions and replies here work on Mastodon.
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@icaria36
Answering to help you debug the fedi integration.
And thanks for the clarification. Despite all the tools to hide/show/be notified, if the space is too vast and too diverse, it tends to break down. Editorial focus is also needed. Trying to be everything to everyone ends up being counterproductive. There are many venues out there (masto, matrix, sites, etc.) and leaning on them for what they do best, and focusing on what you and a forum does best seems like a wiser optionā¦
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Yes! We agree the current scope is too broad and we are still sharpening it ā see Project vision, values, and statement.
(and this is now a test of federating a post with a Discourse quote)
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@icaria36 had another look at the forum this morning.
I read a topic. Got to the end, and there were links to other topics. 2 of them seemed interesting. So I clicked on one, read it, clicked the browser BACK button, and a *whole different list of linked topics* was displayed. So I wasnāt able to read the other topic that seemed interesting. And having read the first one, I didnāt remember what the second one was.
This stinks to high heaven. *I* want to decide what I want to read.
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Oh thatās true! The sort order is only ālatestā or āhotāā¦ I set mine so it defaults to ālatestā, as āhotā is annoying to me too.
Does that help, or does ālatestā move around too much for you? Will have a dig around to see if thereās any other optionsā¦
@icaria36 I donāt know if there are user-level options to handle this once youāve joined, but for someone lurking, the experience is truly horrible.
I think we probably all more or less consciously build at least a rough mental map of the online spaces we visit. So far, despite the broad categories I see on the left, all it takes is a single click to obliterate whatever sense of place you manage to build, and I find that literally infuriating š
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@sknob @icaria36 oh sorry, I just reread what you posted. The linked topics at the end of a post change around, not the main lists of posts. Yeah thatās weird!
@Mel I was talking about the links inside topics, at the bottom of the thread. I donāt see any options to change them there (since I havenāt joined the forum), so this is the default experience, and I feel like Iām on a META platform or something.
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the links on the bottom of thread are clearly and boldly marked as ānew and unreadā. when you click on one of them and open and then use the back button, that topic you clicked logically dissaperas from the list as itās not new (to you) anymore. the forum software is dynamic in the sense itās changing based on what youāve read so far. thatās very different indeed from more static logic of āold schoolā forums where you keep going back to the list of topics that become non-bold as you have clicked on them. at the same time, it is all still here, articles, categories etc, so this different dynamic logic isnāt the dominant one. to note, thereās no nefarious algo at work here like in meta products. itās all very transparent and thought-out open source. itās also very customizable it seems - both on admin side and also some options for the user.
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if it helps, hereās an explanation from meta.discourse:
How does Hot sorting work?
The Hot sort algorithm blends the overall popularity (based on likes, reactions, or comments) of a topic since it was first created and its recent popularity based on how members are interacting with the topic. This means that Hot will surface newer, actively discussed topics alongside older, popular topics. Hot sorting is ideal for members in large, active communities that want to find conversations that are currently trending, which they might want to participate in.
How is it different from Top?
Unlike Hot sorting, which looks at a combination of overall popularity and recent popularity, Top sorting only looks at the overall popularity for the selected time period (e.g., week, month, etc.). Top is most useful when youāve been away from the community for an extended period of time and want to read up on what happened.
Can I make Hot my default home page?
As an end user, you can change your preferred default home page by going to Preferences > Interface and updating the Default Home Page setting to your preferred option.
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the links on the bottom of thread are clearly and boldly marked as ānew and unreadā. when you click on one of them and open and then use the back button, that topic you clicked logically dissaperas from the list as itās not new (to you) anymore.
sknob seems to be saying that the other topics that were not clicked on also disappear 
the forum software is dynamic in the sense itās changing based on what youāve read so far.
iād rather say that itās changing based on its own interpretation of what the users are doing.
while there canāt be a nefarious algo, there are still heuristics at work which are not transparent to the user.
for example, i tried to start some threads, and the preview pane was obscured by a list of āsimilar threadsā, based on what i was typing.
useful for preventing duplication? probably. however the threads were not even remotely similar.
there is a lot of dynamic and automated stuff that works in various small confusing ways, none of them completely outrageous and inexcusable per se, but in total adding up to a disorienting experience on par with those algo-driven platforms.
especially when they fail, since any heuristic is imperfect.
itās all very transparent and thought-out open source
please donāt use ābut the software is open sourceā as an excuse to erase someoneās lived experience. thank you.
if one wants to read ruby and js, one can presumably read a million lines of it and figure out exactly how every little thing work. i donāt think users should be expected to do that in order to have an intuition of where things are.
itās also very customizable it seems - both on admin side and also some options for the user.
this is all well and good. except that there is no option on my end for the particular things that mess with me the most, in turn i donāt feel comfortable bugging the admin to change things for everyone.
the more behaviors a system has, the more necessary customization becomes in order to accomodate everyone. iād like the system to have fewer behaviors, so that there is more room for the usersā behaviors
however this is antithetical to the explicit mission statement of ācivilized discourse construction kit llcā, which comes with the implicit assumptions that:
- there exists such a thing as civilized discourse
- that it is inherently desirable
- that it can be automated
- that what they are doing is automating it
as an american software company, of course they feel no need to provide an authoritative source for their philosophical assumptions to which we are made to conform by organizing our community around their software. in that particular aspect, it is no different from a proprietary platform, even if in other aspects itās considerably less user-hostile.
make of this what you will.
for reference, this is the line count of a checkout of https://github.com/discourse/discourse:
half a million lines of yaml came as something of a surprise to me. thatās not even a ārealā language! (itās a data language frequently abused for configuration that shouldāve been code) EDIT: turns out this may be localization data, which is a legitimate use of yaml.
this is just the core of the software, not including any of the plugins in use. just the installer was 5000 lines.
it is my belief that a forum platform that was itself just 5000 lines would more welcoming to everyone as well as easier to moderate and cultivate a healthy community on. however i realize this is a counterfactual as nobody has actually built it yet.
i do know that āimageboardsā, toxic cesspits as they are, were very simple pieces of software that nonetheless had a huge impact on the culture. sufficiently so that they were subjected to organized takeover by statists and fascists in both the anglosphere and the slavosphere during the 2000-2016 era. whether this forum will influence the culture outside of our little bubble to make big enough enemies to merit all the attention dedicated to moderation remains to be seen, but building atop the american civilized discourse machine felt like shooting ourselves in the foot from the get-go.
wow, this was taken completely out of context (which was comparison with meta products), and totally uncalled for.
i never knew it is up to the speaker to determine what responses are called for, and as opposed to it being up to the responder! have a nice day.
intended meaning was, at best, it was unnecessary, and at worst, in effect hurtful.
(edited!)
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sorry!
i said it because i did find it necessary to point out. but it was not meant to be hurtful ā just like iām certain your response to @sknob was not meant to be hurtful as well!