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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

Modern forum software is much-needed, so I'm glad to see this out there.

But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.

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The most annoying thing about web page UI these days is things that pop up in your face as you pass over them. You look at the page, decide to click something, and as you move your mouse toward it, BLAMO!, some nonsense about Twitter, Facebook, Like Me!, email me to all your friends! jumps up and covers the link you were about to click. You have to jiggle your mouse to shake it off.

Or you are reading, absentmindedly moving your mouse cursor around and POP! POP! POP! things jump out at you, often blocking what you were looking at.

If this forum software is going to become popular, I'm begging the developers to set the default so that you have to actually click an item to bring up a popup window or menu, and you have to at least hover for a while (not just be passing by) to bring up a tool tip.

Books and magazines don't randomly throw things in your face and block your view as you try to read. As you reach up to turn the page, the book doesn't turn into a cell phone already dialing your friends' numbers, insisting that you tell them about the chapter you're reading RIGHT NOW! I'd like my forums to be equally well behaved.

design feel incredibly busy to anyone else?

Yes. My first impression was even worse than the usual PhpBB mess that you see every day.

At least your average PhpBB layout is relatively static.

In Discourse everything constantly flickers, pops up, slides out... The information I care about is buried under all sorts of noise; What are the 5 avatar icons in the thread-list supposed to tell me? Why is the thread-information below the first post? Why on earth are reply-quotes hidden by default and reveal with a painful sliding animation?

I love the simple interface of Stack Overflow. They added a lot of crap over the years but managed to keep it on the right side of the screen where it can be safely ignored (I'm only talking about the actual "question"-page, I haven't used any other SO-page in years).

Please make this look more like SO and less like someone trying to use all his favorite javascript widgets on every page...

We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity by its nature.

That said, we want to have excellent skinning and theming support, and I'd love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it, right?

> We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity by its nature.

Only if you choose to make it so (and you have).

Hacker News demonstrates that it need not be.

Oh, hai.

Can you clarify how "100% free and open-source" relates to "For enterprises, we plan to sell licenses and on-site private instances." ? Specifically, the licenses part.

We require a CLA for code contributions, so we have an underlying license to all the code -- and we can sell it to corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

Oh, OK. It's the dual-licensing GPL/DWTFYW arrangement. Why didn't you just say so? :)

BTW. Tried posting a reply in some thread on try.discourse - it showed up, but then disappeared in a second. Is it some sort of spam filter in action? The UX made no sense whatsoever.

Jeff, Do you envision modifying the variables and mixins as the main way of handling themes? Or is there going to be an admin upload method or something else that you could elaborate on?

Thanks.

Hard to say since it's so early, but I view theming and skinning support as very, very important in the priority list. It's probably the #1 customization people do on forums! And probably on blogs as well...

It also seems very ego-heavy, with lots of user-centric stuff. I find that the more central the concept of a user is the lower the quality of discussion that follows.

StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.

I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.

> StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.

People often make the argument about HN being ugly and hard-to-use vs. those who think it is perfect for what it does (even saying that making it simpler would make it too easy for non-technical people to get involved, which always confused me). Personally, I think all three of these services could be much cleaner and user-friendly without Fisher-Pricing it.

> This is a similar to the argument people make about HN being ugly and hard-to-use vs. those who think it is perfect for what it does.

Apropos, my favorite suggestion for improvement in HN would be a menu item that lists direct replies to one's posts (something that Reddit does). Without this feature, some HN threads just expire because it becomes too difficult to follow them as time passes.

And now I can't reply to scott_s's reply (another weird quirk that I don't understand, since it doesn't seem to be tied to how nested the comment is), but even something as simple as renaming those links would help people ('threads' to 'your comments' and 'comments' to 'recent comments').

Edit: Now the reply link shows up. What's with the timer?

> And now I can't reply to scott_s's reply (another weird quirk that I don't understand, since it doesn't seem to be tied to how nested the comment is),

It's based on time. You can't reply immediately, you have to let some time pass. The idea is that it stops a conversation, a quick back and forth, and forces it to take a while, which should in theory encouraged more reasonable responses.

Does it, though? ;)

The "threads" link at the top is a decent approximation.

Yes, for my posts, but not so effective for replies to them, especially those older than 24 hours.

Here's a bookmarklet that might help some:

https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/4718499

It turns the time stamps on a Hacker News comment page into buttons that hide/show comments that are the same age or older than the clicked time stamp.

It works on the threads page. There are probably some bugs, but it mostly works fine.

I use HN Notify: it sends me an email notification every time someone replies to one of my submissions or comments.

http://hnnotify.com/

>StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.

The design's being so busy has prevented me from exploring the site.

I wish I knew of a browser extension or a bookmarklet to make the site more sedate by, e.g., deleting some of the elements on the page.

User CSS in browser has existed for a while IIRC.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

I sometimes use adblock as an incredibly blunt instrument to delete unwanted page elements.

Isn't that what https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelpe... is for?

This is the design of their demo. They aren't selling a design, they're selling software. With a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript fiddling, you can mould it into any shape you want.

The theme shops will appear if the software becomes popular enough.

And what big factor do you think contributes to a piece of software becoming "popular enough". (Big hint: its design.)

I think the space is growing, especially in the rails world where it's been stagnating for so long. There's discourse, forem and I've even just released my own at http://www.thredded.com (source at http://github.com/jayroh/thredded)

It's definitely more along the same lines visually as the "traditional" forum but I'm hoping that the innovation in the future pops up in the small interactions. Replying, quoting, splitting threads, moderation, interaction via email, etc

Right now the basics are in place that I hope to build the really good flourishes around.

If anyone is intrigued feel free to ask me anything about it or find me on twitter - @thredded or @jayroh

> the design feel incredibly busy

Then you will enjoy this I suspect - http://pivory.com

Hey that's pretty neat. It actually feels pretty different from a standard forum, which is nice. Discourse just feels somewhat samey to me; not much innovation.

This is the definition of busy.

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