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Posted by tightbeam
Oct 29, 2020 at 01:22 PM
I also agree with Dr. Andus. I like the simplicity of the forum. It might *look* dated, but it provides everything necessary for cordial conversation without the clutter common to many modern forums. Why “fix” what isn’t broken?
However, I *would* like to see the forum upgraded with the ability for one user to block another user. While we can always just ignore someone who usurps the forum for his own purposes, it would be nice not to even see what he posts.
Posted by Christoph
Oct 29, 2020 at 01:43 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>I would respectfully disagree with the suggestions to move this forum to
>some other platform or even with the need for any major changes or new
>features.
Thanks for your feedback.
Actually I would not call this “moving”, just modernizing the forum software and making it more user friendly. The URL should not be changed.
>People don’t have to be registered users to be able to read it and it
>has good visibility in search engines.
The same holds true for Discourse forums.
> (I don’t remember ever landing on a Discourse site as the result of a Google search)
Maybe because most don’t have “discourse” in the URL. But try googling for e.g. “On the process of making MOCs” and you willl get a link to the Discourse forum for Obsidian which you can read without login. You can try this with any other comment on that forum, they are all indexed by Google. You will also notice how active people are on that forum. I attribute that not only to the excitement about Obsidian itself, but to some extend also to the great user experience when participating in that forum.
>I follow this forum via an RSS feed and that works for me very well.
Yes, I’m doing the same. Without RSS I would not be able to use this forum. But this results in me inevitably seeing all the discussions. In Discourse I can subscribe to individual categories or threads or mute individual threads.
However, I agree that changing the forum software too radically could alienate long-time users. The last thing I want is that people like you leave the forum because of that. And yes, there are always drawbacks of changing the software. You will probably have to re-register in order to be able to write. And the old forum postings would probably not be integrated and searchable in the new forum software, but maybe only made available in archived form. And it could simply be too much work to maintain the Discourse forum software and keep it up to date.
Posted by Christoph
Oct 29, 2020 at 02:16 PM
tightbeam wrote:
>I also agree with Dr. Andus. I like the simplicity of the forum. It
>might *look* dated, but it provides everything necessary for cordial
>conversation without the clutter common to many modern forums. Why “fix”
>what isn’t broken?
Thanks for the feedback, tightbeam. I understand your point about “simplicity”, but let me try to be the advocatus diaboli here.
One user sees it as “clutter”, the other as necessary feature to make it more usable. You already gave one example: being able to mute certain users. If you ask others, they will give you other examples, and if you implement all of these, you will soon get the “clutter” that you dislike. And you would start to re-implement Discourse or other already existing software which would be a waste of time.
Isn’t the whole purpose of this forum to discuss ways of “fixing” our outliner software needs? Most of the outliner tools we are currently using are all providing everything necessary and are not really “broken”. Yet we are constantly trying to improve our tools or switch to newer tools (see definition of “CRIMPing” in the green navigation on the left).
I always found it somewhat astouding that people who are so eagerly discussing improvements in the usability of information management software and getting more productive, are on the other hand so content with the current forum and willing to stick with its simplicity. :)
Maybe one reason is that this forum gives us cozy feelings *because* it is so simple and stays the same while all the rest is moving. Maybe we need something like that.
Posted by washere
Oct 29, 2020 at 03:59 PM
This has been discussed before and several of us had raised hands for the current quaint archaic experience.
Actually, there are ways to satisfy ‘almost’ all wishes expressed. However time can be of the essence, discussions can easily become circular wastes of time (just needs one), and it’s often wiser to sit back and see what bubbles up, and develops.
In fact merely watching this discussion without suggesting anything, is quite an interesting empirical study. So I look forward to reading further about this particular topic here. I don’t have time to read most threads here but this is interesting. Not unrelated to outliner topic per se either. Kind of like a focus group for forum UX from an outliner enthusiasts’ POV.
Posted by avernet
Oct 29, 2020 at 09:56 PM
Christoph wrote:
>Maybe because most don’t have “discourse” in the URL. But try googling
>for e.g. “On the process of making MOCs” and you willl get a link to the
>Discourse forum for Obsidian which you can read without login. You can
>try this with any other comment on that forum, they are all indexed by
>Google. You will also notice how active people are on that forum. I
>attribute that not only to the excitement about Obsidian itself, but to
>some extend also to the great user experience when participating in that
>forum.
If I remember correctly, Obsidian started just with Discord, and then introduced a Discourse forum. Do you have any thoughts on how adding Discourse to Discord worked for the Obsidian community?
‑Alex