Ning was NOT better. It was NOT easier. It was just familiar

TuDiabetes Website
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Continuing the discussion from Am I the only one confused?:

I believe that is what the Discourse designers intended. The expectation is not that everything which can be done with Discourse should be immediately obvious and “easy”. That’s not how tools work. It takes time to learn to use any new tool more complicated than an hourglass egg timer. :neutral_face:

What they did try to do was to simplify things where they could. To provide only a few main functions and to use the same design elements to implement them. The experience should be consistent to minimize confusion and I think if you step back and look at it you’ll see that it largely is.

It may take time to figure out how something works in Discourse, but once you do you should be able to apply that insight again & again because the same paradigm will be used. One that comes to mind is that if you don’t know what a graphic does, hover on it. Hold the mouse over it and an info tip should pop up which provides more of an explanation.

My impression of Ning was that it was the exact opposite — a complete mess of confusing & conflicting functions with at best only obscure guidance. No consistency and pointless complexity. There were two or more different ways to do the same thing which people seemed to choose among completely at random.

I mean what the heck was the point of “comments” anyway? What value did they add? I never did figure that one out. I would see people try to have a conversation using comments apparently because that’s how they thought you started a discussion.

But discussions were supposed to happen in forums, right? No, wait, there were also groups. Why were there groups? Why? Again, I just never saw what the point was. Groups did the same thing as the fora only in a more isolated and separate way. And there were so very, very, very, very, very, very, many of them. Why? And how were you supposed to choose among them?

Inevitably there was at least one group, possibly several, which duplicated the exact same discussion category which there was already a forum for. Which venue were you supposed to choose? How were you supposed to know? How were people supposed to connect?

And this was “simpler”? This was “better”? :astonished: :unamused:

The primary thing the Ning platform seemed to do best was to split everyone up into cliques passing in the night.

Yes, you had your groups of friends but they often failed to connect with a larger community. How could they? They were isolated in their own identical but separate discussion areas. Unless new people were able to stumble upon and also insert themselves into one of these “hidden in plain sight” cliques, they would drift a bit only to quickly fade away.

Why else do you think there are over 14,000 accounts but the vast majority of them were only used a few times and then went idle?

Ning was not simpler. Or Easier. It was the opposite. But it was familiar and thus comfortable for those who had persevered. It’s amazing to me how much abuse people will not only endure, but even grow to cherish simply because it is familiar to them. :confounded: :confused:

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As a web professional myself I was going to make a similar point. It always takes some adjustment to adapt to a new interface and it’s easy to make the mistake of “preferring the devil you knew” just because you haven’t really acclimated yet.

One thing I absolutely HATED about the old system was how difficult it was to tell who was responding to whom in longer discussion threads. As soon as it got past a page or two–and breaking them into pages was itself a totally obsolete and misconceived piece of interface design–you had no idea to what earlier statement a given comment was responding or by which member member unless mentioned by name. This led to serious confusion for me numerous times, when I couldn’t tell if someone was reacting to something I had said or someone else entirely, and there was no way to figure it out. No platform is perfect but that situation is much improved on the current site and for that alone I vastly prefer it over the old one, even if there are still some bugs to be worked out.

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Yes, Discourse still needs to be improved. I am not satisfied with how the replies are currently linked to the comment or topic being replied to. Often if there is no quote from the OP included in the comment then I don’t see any “link back” at all. I’m still not sure what’s up with that.

But since Discourse is still being actively developed, I am hopeful these quirks can be smoothed out. :joy: :smirk_cat:

Ning was just so bloated and entwined in unpredictable ways that I personally did not believe it was possible to ever change it.

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I’m using the “quote reply” more and more, but is it doubling up if we also use @irrational_John or as I call them @ mentions? I mean is it redundant? does it give you 1 or 2 notifications in your blue circle (still wish I knew the proper names for the symbols, all I know is the hamburger)

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Yes, it is (usually) redundant. If you have quoted text from someone’s post then my understanding is that a notification will be placed in that person’s notification queue/list.

No, I do not think the person gets multiple notifications. (Duplicate notifications certainly should not be posted and if they did it would be a bug that should be reported & fixed in the core Discourse release.)

In general I would discourage automatically using the @. It really should be more like the cc: on an email. While you are posting you think “MarieB might also be interested in this, so I’ll reach out and tap her on the shoulder so she can take a look.”

The one exception to the above might be editing. If you edit a post then you might want to @ a person just to put a notification on their queue so they know to look at your edits. Maybe that happens anyway, but I haven’t tested it and I wouldn’t expect it to.

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Why “hamburger”? Looks like a stack of pancakes to me!! :smile:

But seriously, will there be a permanent FAQ section or Help button for people new to Discourse (and who maybe aren’t comfortable with either using the search function or just trying out the various buttons or menu items)?

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I’m with you CL - I don’t get the hamburger reference either. I kept looking for one as well. It does look like pancakes to me or 3 lines of typing. I guess we are as creatively gifted? :smile:

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I continue to “@” members in replies to them as part of the way I post. It just seems natural that if you want to talk to someone by name that you are replaying to the “@” allows further readers to press on their name and their profile pops up. I would agree that when mentioning another member they should only get the “@” if you explicitly want them notified.

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Yeah, but it seems to really ■■■■ Zoe off for reasons which completely escape me. Since I’m never sure who it will offend, I’ve taken to minimizing my use of it. Just sayin’ …

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oooooo @irrational_John said a berry berry bad word.

Note to self, don’t “@” Zoe

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That hamburger icon is really the hamburger menu icon. Here is a color picture of it:

c3b7cb57b08806e5.png800×600 9.75 KB

And some some history:

Its designer, Norm Cox. Here’s how Cox responded when asked about the icon in a GIZMODO interview:

You’ve done your homework and found the right guy. I designed that symbol many years ago as a “container” for contextual menu choices. It would be somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button.

Its graphic design was meant to be very “road sign” simple, functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. With so few pixels to work with, it had to be very distinct, yet simple. I think we only had 16x16 pixels to render the image. (or possibly 13x13… can’t remember exactly).

Interesting inside joke… we used to tell potential users that the image was an “air vent” to keep the window cool. It usually got a chuckle, and made the mark much more memorable.

It’s been nice to see that so many of our designs from those early pioneering years have stood the test of time and become ubiquitous symbols in our UI’s.

As for the @ business, I will probably just laugh out loud when I see it used from now on. LOL!!

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I learn something new everyday. :smile: I can see the ‘air vent’ image. I think I’m missing the hamburger image since it’s gray.

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I agree with you, and if I keep trying, I will learn how to use Discourse, but it is difficult since I usually do not have access to the Reply button at the bottom of my written reply. I see it is there now, so I had better hit it while I have a chance.

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Here’s a link to another history article Google turned up. I haven’t read it to the end, but it looked like possibly worth mentioning.
A Brief History of the Hamburger Icon

I was surprised to find that Cox created the icon as part of the developement for a Xerox workstation released in 1981 or nearly 3 1/2 decades ago. I thought it was more recent than that. :astonished:

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@irrational_John, thanks for the additional history. I don’t really enjoy blogs, though. I remember when I first came to TuD and had to learn Ning because it was totally different. Hopefully folks will get used to this new gig. I am learning to get around. I was annoyed when the CHAT area was the prominent thing when I dropped in. Thankfully I figured out how to get around that!

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I totally agree! I’m so happy everything flows in one spot. I always felt like I was missing something somewhere because I wasn’t looking/posting in groups, discussions and blogs…

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I heard an audio interview of someone behind the DHF scene on another forum yesterday (can’t recall interviewer or DHF person). One key point that was casually thrown in at the end was that the WP and Discourse interconnection was left until last! So, here we are with an active new site that seems to me was not ready for prime time when it went public. Yes, I am getting around in it but the flaws are things that seem to me could have been worked out beforehand. But, not being a programmer, I could be wrong (smile). The logging in/out issue appears to be the lack of interconnectedness yet. It would be nice if these two separate programs could get their act together and get married. Perhaps both are sulking because they prefer to work alone. Who knows?!

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The thought of Wordpress and Discourse sulking instead of getting together and “marrying” makes me laugh.

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Perfect representation! :smile:

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For the first time since the conversion, I found an interesting diabetes related thread and hit reply to add some of my viewpoint and was successful. I used to post several times a week but with this new website, probably will be doing a lot less participation.

One thing I note about the new website, is that the “home page” I see devotes maybe just 3% of screen space to the active discussions. The entire first screen before I scroll down is just big enormous logos that someone is obviously really proud of. The second page I can see a bunch of fluff on the edges like ads and banners. Most of the new website seems to be dominated by (surprise) folks being proud of the new website. Buried in little type in the second page of the front page of the website is some sort of default listing of discussions just showing the title and there seem to be several “website conversion” discussions that are pinned very very high resulting in very little actual D-oriented active discussions. I spent several weeks post-conversion just seeing this screen and not knowing where any interesting discussions are.

This morning I did better when I clicked on the button “view all topics” - again the highest pinned discussions are not about diabetes but about the website, but if I scroll down to the second page I start to see active diabetes-related discussions.

Nothing against the new website software per se, but you guys gotta stop having the home page be just some giant logo with no actual visible discussion content. Maybe you guys have customized your login webpage to show something other than the giant logo, or maybe you guys just like the giant logo front page so much that you don’t object to it. I really miss being able to quickly load the front page, see the active discussions and some recent comments in those discussions.

I don’t mind a nice compact tudiabetes logo on the home page telling folks that they’ve reached tudiabetes. (Although you might think that folks already know what website they visited). But the giant banners that completely dominate the home page and brag about the new website software, make it real hard to find the actual diabetes-related discussions anymore.

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