Forum software is awful

So, I have no clue if I will be able to make this post. Let’s see what happens.

1. The Google captcha when signing up makes sense, but it’s not obviously so vital on signing in, because I have to pass the signing-up captcha to make an account in the first place. This is an issue, because completing the captcha is extremely difficult. I tried, and gave up, three times over the course of two days, before managing to log in today. Different people have different experiences of the captcha system; what happens for you in not what happens for all.

2. I have discovered that the forum appears to have an undisclosed length limit to posts. I say appears, because I’m guessing. When I try to post, I get a dialog which says “403” and nothing else.

3. When I break up my post into smaller parts, I then find out “new users can only make three replies in one thread”. This when combined with the length limit, is problematic : I CANNOT WRITE ABOUT THE SCREEN ISSUE BECAUSE THE POSTS ARE TOO SMALL AND I CAN NOW ONLY WRITE ONE NEW POST IN THE THREAD.

4. The limit of three posts in a thread includes deleted posts.

5. The reason I have deleted posts is because I was trying to figure out what was happening with the undisclosed post length limit.

The limit on posts for new users is problematic because it is often going to be that someone has a problem which causes them to sign up. Preventing those users from posting properly is the most singularly unhelpful act possible at that time.

Minor secondary issues, which may be me getting things wrong;

1. I can see other people can quote replies, but I can’t see any way in which to do this, so I’m making new replies and indicating in the writing which earlier replies and given material is in response to.

2. Drafts appear to be saved, even if you choose “do not save draft”.

3. Emoji are automatically converted into icons. I can’t stand icons, so I now type all my emoji with an extra space in, to prevent this from happening.

4. The forum software is highly interruptive. It continually throws messages at you while you are trying to focus on writing a post or reply.

I don’t know about a post length limit, I’ve seen some pretty long posts. The post limit only applies to new users to prevent spam. I’m sorry that you’ve had some bad experiences thus far. The captcha shouldn’t be triggered every time you log in.

another thing to note is that if you are having an issue, you can send a message to support, which has no length limit, and will get you in contact directly with the Framework team. That being said, this is something for the team to look into as it is definitely a point of friction for new users who want to document issues they are having.

GhostLegion - I saw the same kind of behaviour on the Amazon Web Services forums.

New users can post once a day.

What was happening was users would run into some serious problem, need help immediately, in their urgency and need make a forum account, post and explain the situation… and find they could not reply to any replies they received, because they were limited to one post per day.

In my experience (Firefox for both mobile and desktop), highlighting the text you want to quote causes a ‘"quote’ button to appear below the highlighted text. Clicking that creates a new post editing window with the quote at the top.

This annoyed me as well in the beginning. I think I’m just way too old and used to the old stuff like phpBB, because it took me months to figure out that you highlight text to get a quote option…

Are you referring to sign-in-with-google here? In that case, I suspect this is Google’s captcha, not Framework. And in anti-spam efforts, the fact that you proved yourself not a robot when signing up is not strictly relevant: if your account details have leaked in a data breach somewhere (remember: most people re-use login credentials), spambots can attempt to use those login credentials on every place they can to do their work.

I don’t use google sign-in here though, and don’t think I’ve ever run into a captcha. At least not recently.

This sounds like a bug. 403 is the error code for “Forbidden”, as in, “You are not allowed access to this service.” What I would expect in the “too long” scenario, if that exists, is probably 400 - Bad Request (and that it should be gracefully handled in Frontend).

All that said: I’m not sure if it’s just me being old and grumpy, but this specific forum software is really annoying to me, and what’s even more annoying is that pretty much every second website on the internet that needs a forum has switched to it…

I first encountered this forum back on the Ci20 dev board (from MIPS) web-site. For me, I think it’s the worst I’ve ever used, and by a wide margin.

The Google captcha - I mean to say, when logging in with email address and password (so, forum specific login), a captcha must be completed, and this is extremely difficult. However, I note logging in now there was no captcha - but I note I logged in I think on the main site, and then went to the forum. Did I dodge the captcha?

The thread titles in dark mode are a poor choice of colour too, makes it difficult to read.

In a long thread, when I’m at the bottom, I grab the browser scroll bar and pull it to the top of the page.

The forum then loads a bunch more posts (upwards), and moves my browser scroll bar to the middle of the page.

I need to scroll up to the top of page a number of times, to actually get to the top of the page.

I love this forum software. It’s great. I wish other forums were using it. FYI, it’s from GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.

Checking this on my own computer it seems like you’re using the webpage scrollbar. Due to the way the forum software is working, it seems that it only loads a portion of the posts in a thread at a time, causing the behavior you are seeing. The workaround for this is to use the forum’s thread scrollbar, located next to the post, or condensed into a bar along the bottom of the page on mobile or while the reply box is open.

This is the appearance normally:

This is the condensed appearance:

This is true, and unfortunately the dark mode settings are determined by the forum owners, and Framework has not updated their dark mode with recommendations from the community in a long time (they really do need to work on this). For the time being, your options are to use the light theme, or what I do is I use the web extension Dark Reader, which does a very good job converting the Framework forum into a much easier to read dark mode.

Yes. But this is nuts =-) “we’ve written our forum! it breaks the vertical scroll bar in your browser! isn’t is great!!”

This still has issues with scrolling, precisely because the content is only being loaded in real time, as you said.

The same issues were present in old phpBB forums, you just had to click through “1…2…3…45…47” instead of scrolling through. It’s arguably information overload rather than poor software design.

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That said I wanted to show something I noticed editing the wiki just now:

The original second bullet point is detected as a new line, when I really just inserted one line above. So that is a bit funky.

All in all, I like discourse, but coming from a larger screen to the Framework size screen (or mobile) is a little challenging due to the large space occupied by UI and organizational elements.

I do understand your frustration, I felt the same way at first. I’ve gotten used to the way discourse does things having used this forum for quite a while, but it has it’s quirks.

I’d guess that if you had a good open source alternative, you could definitely recommend it and the Framework team would consider implementing it sometime in the future. Just also know that the previous community manager left and I don’t remember hearing an announcement of anyone new filling the position yet. It’s likely that changing to a different forum software at this time would be a big and difficult task, so the team may not get around to even considering it for a while.

Wow, that extension sure makes a huge difference. I had to use the light theme here as the titles were unreadable in the dark theme, as noted by @Ian_M. My preference is always for a dark theme for readability with a lot less eye strain. Thank you for that suggestion, its a very useful one for me.

Let me just weigh in here a bit, if you all wouldn’t mind. Basically, the reason for discourse having the settings that it does for new forum accounts has a long and storied history. In a nutshell spam, bots, trolls, etc. make all of this necessary. We as the volunteer moderators have dealt with a lot of this, and it might not be all that apparent to average forum user (which we are happy about), but it is a serious concern.

Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. And feedback is appreciated. It is just that from my perspective these rules, as new accounts become established have been really beneficial. Remember, official Framework help is done directly through their support channels, and not here on the forums. This is a community driven framework supported atmosphere. Framework’s involvement cannot always be guaranteed, but they are great about being here. This community has become and continues to be a community driven collection of useful Framework specific help, and we appreciate all of you for making it what it is.

Is this true? Last time I opened a support ticket I got a canned email saying

Please note that we’re able to respond more quickly to support requests through our Support Form​​. Responses to emails may be delayed.

Edit: I am dumb. Ignore me

It says “form” not “forum”

Correct, what they mean is that you will get a faster, guaranteed response from them by submitting a form here. The support team is only available during their work hours, meaning they don’t respond on the weekends, but they are the most knowledgeable. The forum here is a user forum, so you may be able to get solutions to your problems from users who have dealt with the same issues, but there is no obligation for anyone to respond to your post.