Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

Oh dear, this is what I feared from The People That Brought You StackOverflow: Numbers everywhere. Thousands of tiny icons, all alike.

Stackoverflow seems to me to be a giant case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. "We made a site driven by points and numbers and rules and gamification and it was success, therefore it was the numbers and gamification that did it". No, SO was a success because the tech world was gasping for a forum that wasn't a) mailing lists or b) expertsexchange. That's all. That's why the majority of their non-tech sites have bombed.

If Discourse is a success it will be because phpBB is hideous, not because of any merits shown here. A better model to ape would have been the truly successful community sites -- think the Well, or Metafilter. Flat. UI that gets out the way.

Humans are superb at managing conversations, tracking threads and managing state. It's how forums manage to be so good despite phpBB and the like. Let the humans get on with it. Get out the way.

We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin.

The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it.

And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.

I have to agree with the OP. While Discourse design looks different from vBulletin and phpBB, it's unfortunately just another variety of the same. It is busy and it's ... uhm ... giddy if you will. Why the heck does every message need a full toolbar of buttons, for example? Badges, counters - I think others are right, the gamification of SE wasn't the reason for its success. In fact, it might've pushed away more qualified posters than it actually attracted. Why not try something different, or at least make all the paraphernalia optional?

Take a look at the Pivory project - that's a great take on design that doesn't stick out, but doesn't hinder the usage either. Adopt something similar as your default theme, kill the badges and you will have a discussion software that is dramatically better than vBulletin, across the board.

It's not the cosmetic problems of the phpBB design you've brought over so much as it is the fundamental problems. Take, for example, the list of threads. Just like phpBB, there are lots of columns of numbers, and stats, nearly all unnecessary. Likes? Views? Activity? Participants?

The job here is to judge a thread. If a thread's good, people will post on it, and it will bump to the top. That's it. The only other things you need to know are title and size (number of posts).

Even the avatars are unnecessary here: either the community is small and it'll be all the usual suspects on every thread, or the community is huge and most of the avatars will be meaningless.

phpBB's deep problem is it overloads human conversation with metrics and geegaws that are there only because they were easy to code. They distract from the discourse, and I fear they'll detract from Discourse.

Apart from all the space they waste, most implementations of avatars that use gravatar are a privacy leak, associating the MD5 of the user's email with every post on the net anywhere.

They should use the MD5 of the username instead.

Edit: You can change both so neither are permanent.

Edit 2: Not disagreeing with you. Only mentioned that username and email can both be changed to say there's no reason not to use username for the MD5

Yes, but you have to know it's a privacy leak, and then you have to change it. And in the meantime, WordPress and Gravatar insist it's not a privacy leak at all.

I find my meaningless avatars very useful. It helps to see when the someone is replying further down a thread.

http://i.imgur.com/LNIXIp3.png

Is that some kind of HN userscript, or did you mock up the screenshot?

It's a greasemonkey userscript running in Chromes Tampermonkey extension. It uses https://github.com/hgwr/identicon to generate data uri's for the avatars. I also have a hard coded map of usernames to icons. In the image above codinghorror has his own avatar as well as the stackexchange icon (I'll have to add one for discourse now). I've added many many more from icons for other users so I can remember their current and previous affiliations (which appear with 50% opacity).

To make it quick to add new icons I have a bunch of bookmarklets for finding the favicon for a site, doing a flood fill of the alpha channel from the corners and resize it to 16x16 if it is a newer larger favicon. So adding a icon generally takes less the 30 seconds.

I would be interested in seeing this turned into a true Google Chrome extension.

I always seem to miss who's replying. In a sense it's great since we are treated as equals, but I sometimes miss a great reply by pg and others.

I hesitate to share the code for this as it could change the nature of HN if it became widespread. (It would also take more time to convert it to an extension that anyone could use than I have available right now.)

I understand. Both points are valid, and I wish you well on the projects you spend your time on. ;)

Honestly, although phpBB's design leaves a hell of a lot to be desired (messy, table-based, complex, not pretty), the benefit I see from this as an open source competitor is that it's Rails and MVC.

This is a sight for sore eyes for someone who has to maintain a phpBB forum and its modifications (all of which, by design, require patching the source code with some bizarre XML-diff format).

Even with no formal plugin architecture, the decision to choose Rails is massively beneficial.

+1...

It's also beneficial from a security point of view.

Even if Ruby had a few security exploits recently, there shall never be as many issues as there have been with PHP.

I'm a huge forum users and they're regularly brought down (2+2, one of the biggest forum on the planet, was taken offline for weeks due to a PHP exploit).

That's a bad code problem, not a PHP problem. Why does this meme continue to exist?

This is a PHP bug: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010511-php-floating-po...

Everything else? Bad code.

When bad code happens because the language is a security minefield, blame the language.

Such as when things like this happen? http://erratasec.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/rubygithub-hack-tra...

The security vulnerability occurred because of Rails models' mass attribute assignment, which you wouldn't have in a less dynamic language. So yes, that's a problem at least partially attributable to the language.

Language influences both how much bad code you get, and how large consequences arise from typical mistakes.

A larger than average proportion of bad code is a fault of the language, the design choices/compromises made for the language structure.

As much as I want to defend PHP a bit as a PHP coder who at least _tries_ and is kind of sick of the pile-on (while understanding the rationale), I'm reminded of the thousand odd reasons that PHP sometimes makes me just want to cry into my coffee.

I think it's both bad code and PHP.. specifically bad code written on old versions of php on crap shared hosts where that's the only server-side language available. It should be harder to write insecure code with PHP but it isn't. A language whose entire purpose is to process requests and return content should have security baked into its core. I shouldn't have to wake up one day and find out that "oh, anyone who adds an ?-s flag to their queries can maybe read your source code or whatnot." Now granted, it wasn't that common, but it should never have existed. PHP may not be the great evil some claim it is but there are parts of it that jump out of the dark and bite you, no doubt.

PHP vs Rails for security is like cyanide versus hemlock for health.

As someone who has derived great value from many of the 'non-tech' Stack Exchange sites, I dispute your claim that these sites have "bombed!"

Many of them are not (yet) household names like SO is around here, but they have thriving communities and provide real value, answering real questions, and providing legacy content that will be of use to people for decades to come.

>UI that gets out the way.

This is the biggest problem with the current fad in web design. Designers are designing for their own sense of "look what I can do" instead of for users. People need to stop designing UIs for the sake of seeing how much crap they can stuff in front of my face and start designing UIs to be used.

But the current 'fad' is exactly what you're talking about: flat, minimalist, getting out of the way? The "stuff as much crap as possible" design feels a bit 2002 right now. Personally I hope it stays minimalist.

Personally I hate the minimalist fad, and this is speaking as a minimalist.

I want a UI that shows me information I need and exposes actions I can take. That means (relative) timestamps and quote buttons, not client devices and administration buttons. It definitely does not mean the style previously known as Metro. If there's whitespace on the screen, stick something there that I will need eventually but wouldn't find without using it daily.

>But the current 'fad' is exactly what you're talking about: flat, minimalist, getting out of the way?

I only see that for the online version of a brochure. "This is us, buy our thing". There can't really be much of a user interface for those, since there's not much to do, and currently they are all identical ugly bootstrap things with obnoxious javascript scrolling instead of pages.

But actual web apps, where there has to be a user interface to let you interact with things I see mostly a "throw everything on there and who cares if it is usable" approach.

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