Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting to hear someone else say this because all I'd really heard before this comment thread today was good things about Discourse.

I ran my own Discourse forum for a while. Users liked it well enough, but eventually I switched to using the free Steam community forums (it was a forum for a game) because it was costing me every month to run a separate server for it on Amazon.

During Discourse's life it also changed recommended install methods and auto-updates would occasionally break, so it was work to maintain. To be fair a lot of this was on relatively early versions.

I also found the Ctrl-F breaking and infinite scroll much more annoying than useful and tried to tell them[1] along with others. They listened somewhat and switched to only taking over Ctrl-F on long pages, but it's still not great. In fact I just tried to Ctrl-F for my post on the page I linked and got taken to my profile page instead.

[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-taking-over-ctrl-f/16...

Just as a side note, you said you hosted the Discourse on AWS, but Digital Ocean have a $10/month automated, one-click deployment which includes TBs per month of bandwidth.

Perhaps that's an option should you choose to self-host again? :-)

Definitely. That wasn't an option when I first created the forum. Nor was using Docker. I changed my forum to Docker later, but things could still go wrong occasionally. There's a nice web interface for updating to newer forum versions but that still broke once or twice.

simply press CTRL+F twice.

How is the average person supposed to know to do that?

the type of people that prefer the generic browser facilities over custom search aren't "average people".

I feel like I'm a pretty average person.

My instinct when I'm looking for something is to Ctrl+F, not scour the UI for a search bar.

Anecdotally, I know people who are not programmers who are the same way.

if you're here, you're not an average person

Would these "average people" try to press Ctrl+F? If the argument is that most of the public is ignorant to the client-side jumping/highlighting facilitated by Ctrl+F, what purpose does overriding Ctrl+F serve? It seems that people who press Ctrl+F would have an expectation of what should happen next, and people who want custom search would move their mouse to the search bar and click.

Maybe a better compromise would be including a modal or a hint highlighting the site-wide search box without suppressing the native Ctrl+F functionality.

The average person doesn't use ctrl+f/cmd+f; but still, for the ones who do, having to press it twice breaks muscle memory, it draws attention that something is broken or doesn't work quite like everything else.

I tried to cover that in the example I gave at the link I posted. The forum link in the example is broken now since this was 2014 but the idea still holds:

Imagine Jimmy wants to know how to pin a topic on a Discourse forum. He searches Google for pin topic discourse or whatever, and he sees a result with a text preview saying "...icon in the upper right to get the staff menu for the topic; select Pin Topic."

That looks right, so he ends up here: http://www.phylobabble.org/t/discourse-admin-quick-start-gui...

That's a big post, so he Ctrl-F searches for "pin topic". Normally his browser would already be highlighting the text in the post, but nothing happens, so he tries clicking on the only result. This just refreshes the page and puts him back at the same post.

At this point Jimmy either leaves the forum to try another result that doesn't hijack his browser search, combs the whole thread manually, or mashes Ctrf-F enough that he discovers the Ctrl-F-F override and types "pin topic" again, instantly highlighting the section that he wanted all along.

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