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Comment by georgyo | Hacker News Reader

I don't like to hate on products, but I fully agree. Discourse is absolutely unusable to me.

I've tried several times, but I cannot get it to show me a view that is useful. IE, what's new. Instead I get some algorithm that is determining hotness, which doesn't seem to ever change.

I've tried the mailing list mode, and a forum that I thought was dead was absolutely too much chatter for email. I tried the web interface again and was lost again.

The fact that many projects and people I respect choose discourse implies to me that I'm the one who is missing something. But maybe it's a collective mirage.

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I run https://forum.open-services.net/ and "Latest" is the default option. You actually have to explicitly click "Top" to "get some algorithm that is determining hotness". As an admin, I can show you the Top view but the default in Discourse is Latest, just as you'd expect.

Pagination: yes, it's not the best but you can click and drag the slider on the right: https://forum.open-services.net/t/introduce-yourself/21/7 (the one that says 7/31). The (bookmarkable) URL will change when you release that slider. You can also click on "Aug 2017" which is a sort of the first page and "26d ago" that brings you to the last "page"

Mailing list mode: I recommend to use a weekly activity digest (Under /u/YourUsernameHere/preferences/emails) and under favorite categories you select "Watching First Post" (under the bell icon in the top right).

But no, you are not missing anything. Most of forum systems come with notification dials set to the max that you need to dial back a bit.

> Instead I get some algorithm that is determining hotness, which doesn't seem to ever change.

Perhaps the Discourse forum you visited had Top as the default view? Usually it's Latest which is the topics which most recently had a reply. When you create an account on the forum you should have the New and Unread views available as well, which are tailored to your user account.

> I've tried several times, but I cannot get it to show me a view that is useful. IE, what's new.

That's odd. This is definitely something it can do, and in my experience it is the default view or at least easily available. E.g., the front page of llllllll.co is just that.

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