@conradical has been around for a very long time. He is one of the old guard. I think we may even have been on staff together in the old days when I was a mentor.
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Hi all! I haven’t been here for a few months and now I see a revolution!
Good to know these forums are evolving and some people are taking care of them since it would be a pity to be left with Stackoverflow and its derivatives only…
As to the new forum I still don’t know if I like it or not since I haven’t spent much time here yet. What I can say now is I find the layout a bit too flat, minimalistic, plain, boring. It is well suited for mobile devices with small screens but on the desktop it looks a bit bland - I preferred the old looks where individual posts and other items had clearer visual boundaries and there was not so much white empty space. I think the forum would benefit from styling by a good graphic designer to make this place look a bit more professional and unique (and less mobile-phonish).
But this is quite subjective and really not that serious. If these changes help the staff keep the place running smoothly and with less spammers then it’s all for the better after all.
Keep up the good work and glad to see this place is alive and kicking!
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Great to see you back. Thanks for the constructive feedback. 
The design is definitely something that we will continue to refine, but for now we are focussing on ensuring the the processes are smooth and clearly defined.
Yes, definitely the looks are of lesser importance now. Some of my other observations this time having more to do with usability:
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When I choose a category from the main page at http://www.sitepoint.com/community/ and then hit the back button in my browser the scroll position is not remembered. However, it is remembered on forum pages with topic lists and posts.
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I am surprised to find out that navigating the new forum is much slower than the old one - the pages take a long time to render. Most of the time is not spend on network connections but on the browser doing some heavy (javascript?) work to render the pages. For example, from the page at http://www.sitepoint.com/community/category/php I go to this discussion http://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/only-get-documents-where-id-of-person-logged-in-in-array/41501 and the latter page takes about 5 seconds to render in Firefox and SeaMonkey during which time the browser locks up and I see the black “loading” icon and my CPU usage goes up to the full (it’s 50% of my dual-core). In Chrome the same thing takes up about 10 seconds (so much for Chrome being faster, btw.). All this ajax stuff combined with dynamic page rendering with js seems to be very taxing and overall is noticeably slower than traditional html pages. Actually, when I compare the speed of standard forums side by side, the sitepoint forums are slow in comparison.
I would like this to sound constructive but I’m afraid this is the nature of the beast and probably you won’t be able to squeeze much more speed since all this heavy scripting seems to be the underlying engine of the forums. But who knows - maybe there is a way to get rid of some bottleneck?
Hrm, interesting. All feedback to date is that this is a hell of a lot faster than what we had before (which is also my experience).
Is anyone else having speed issues?
[quote=“Lemon_Juice, post:134, topic:741”]
I would like this to sound constructive
[/quote] Yup, I get that and it’s appreciated.
Sometimes I experience a lag but I chalk it up to my slow home computer but on my work computer it seems pretty quick.
I have seen some sluggishness in the Notifications dropdown loading once in a while. But nothing show stopper.
That is true and the discourse team knows about it. Hopefully a fix for that will occur at some point. One thing to mention is it is really noticeable when you haven’t loaded another “page” of data. Once another page of data is loaded it actually works much better.
Weird, I don’t have this issue. Have you tried disabling your addons to see if any of them are playing a part in the performance hit?
You disagree with me, but then agree in the end. 
Ok, that sounds good to me!
Though, my point wasn’t about things that “might” be an issue. It certainly was about the smilies and how to use them, which ralphm, one of the team from his Co-admin title, agreed was something he also didn’t like.
But seriously, I was bothered by this too, so as a stop gap, I loaded them all into the Cheat Sheet (near the bottom). They have recently changed from the emoji set to some other set with an ever weirder name. We are looking into options for changing this, as no one is really that pleased with them.
His idea was to write them up in a Cheat Sheet to make it better. I say, it isn’t enough.
And that is where I have to say to @HAWK, I am not a naysayer, just a person pointing out what I think are issues with the new software, which others have agreed are issues. So I am not the only “naysayer”, just the only person with maybe the motivation to say something out loud, which also may dampen the fun. Not my intention, I want you to have even more fun.
Nobody yet has given me counter argumentation, as to why the smiley system is, well, it simply sucks. Yet several have agreed it needs improvement. And it does. In a place where only about 15% of emotion can be conveyed, you’ve left the other 85% to some pretty ugly dudes (the smilies) and the selection of them is a total guessing game. My first impression was there are no smilies.
The same goes for the referencing of post replies and ending up reading them twice. No argumentation of why it is better or really good as a feature. As it is done here, it is simply a poorly executed concept in Discourse. Letting users read content twice for no apparent reason is a no-go.
Yes, this software is a lot “fresher” than vBulletin is. That is for sure. It is also quicker. But, that doesn’t get rid of the blaring issues that can hold back this forum from working even better.
My suggestions.
Fix the smiley system by at least changing the smilies and have the selection show a link to where a user can find the whole list of smiley BBCodes.
Next, get rid of the “Reply(ies)” button completely and move the referenced post next to the name of the poster, so it looks like this.
That way, it almost reads, “s_molinari replied to ralphm”. Oh, and only show the post it was referencing, not the mix of comments before it. That only confuses.
Again, just suggestions. Take them or leave them and whatever happens, do have fun!
Scott
Hi Scott,
I don’t personally have an issue with it and since I’ve been prioritising the work that we do, it hasn’t come up yet.
If that’s your number one complaint, I think I’ll consider the migration a success.
I have a few addons in SeaMonkey but only Flashblock in Firefox and no addons in Chrome since I use this browser only for testing web sites - so the addons are not the culprit. I’ve noticed the slow operation mostly occurs on large topics like the one I linked to above, on most pages the speed is fine (more or less). Curiously, sometimes pages load slower when using back/forward rather than clicking topic links. This will also depend on the hardware, people with fast modern processors will not notice so many slow downs. My processor is not top of the line but is not anything ancient, either (Athlon II X2 270 3.40GHz) and most web sites render fast. It seems that unfortunately sitepoint forums require top of the line hardware for best experience.
But later I went on to see how these forums work on my mobile phone - not a powerful phone but still last year’s model LG L5 II. I normally use a fairly unpopular UC Browser because it has very good features of text zooming and reflowing, which makes reading all kinds of texts and articles most convenient. Unfortunately, sitepoint forums are almost unusable in that browser - back/forward navigation doesn’t work at all and forum threads are only read-once: after reading a topic when I go to the topic list and click on the same topic again it will not load, only a blank page will show up. UC Browser is based on webkit, I suppose, I use it a lot and sitepoint is the first site to break so badly in it…
Then I tried Opera - this worked better. Back/forward work fine and no problems with multiple topic reading - almost. Occasionally, the back button would get me to a different page than I was viewing previously and sometimes clicking on a topic link would result in nothing happening - no indication of what is going on, just nothing. Reloading the page and repeating the process seems to help but such weird issues happen from time to time. But the worst thing is speed - the PHP topic I mentioned above takes 35 seconds to load! Then, when I go to the previous page and then press the Forward button in the browser it takes almost 2 minutes for the same page to show up! The browser is locked up during that time and I can’t do anything. What I found was that loading the top of the topic page is very slow while loading the bottom is quite fast. Also, while browsing various forum topics sometimes scrolling becomes slow and very jerky and sometimes the page is visible but not responsive and after a while the browser says the page is not responding and do I want to close it now (which I almost always have to do in order to quit the unresponsive page and get the browser to work again).
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the new forums to work so bad on my mobile phone considering Discourse seems to be designed with mobile devices in mind. I browse a lot of web sites and I can’t remember having experienced such slow and unpredictable behaviour elsewhere. Possibly, Discourse again is targeting users with most modern top of the line devices with fast multi-core processors…
As a final consolation I can say that on my desktop computer when js is turned off these forums simply fly! Every page loads up instantaneously. Unfortunately, the layout is almost inexistent and there are no user features like replying, writing, etc., just some basic content for search engines. It seems Discourse has transferred most of the burden of building page layout from the server side to the client side. As a consequence the server works fast while the client - well, if the hardware is powerful then it will be fast, too.
Hi ya.
Discourse has fairly stringent browser and device requirements.
Ah yes. It’s a Javascript app.
If smilies are near the top of your list, we did good. Smilies are definitely not a priority, they are more of an expression, and you can use them no matter how hideous they are, and when they change, they will be updated. Keep in mind, they are the default set provided by Discourse, so we didn’t pick them, they were included.
You may want to ask these questions over at https://meta.discourse.org, you seem to be interested in why certain decisions were made, but are asking the wrong people. We didn’t build this from the ground up, we opted to use it for the extensibility it provides us. The developers who actually built it could answer your questions a lot better than we can. (just a thought)
Yeah, I have a fairly out-dated phone and although I can get the forums to load, it is sometimes painful to use it on my phone. I’ve primarily stuck to using my tablet to navigate the forums (which is also a bit dated, but works far better). However, that is purely because of Discourse’s high browser/device requirements, so I knew my expectations would be limited to what they officially support.
Where have you been, @HAWK? @conradical was posting over at vBulletin through August and September…
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Yes - also problems with pages not loading properly and other unexpected behaviour (mostly reported in staff areas). Searching by tag is particularly slow, especially with a popular tag, usually generates an “unresponsive script” message after about ten seconds and can freeze the browser.
Edit This is Firefox 32 on Ubuntu Gnome (PC).
I have tried recommended Chrome (on my mobile with Android 4.1.2) and not really much better. The forums are slow to load and browse and larger threads are almost impossible to navigate, it takes about 2 minutes to load a page, then it’s even worse than in Opera, because Opera at least finally un-freezes itself and allowes me to navigate the thread while Chrome remains in a half-frozen state where scrolling is almost impossible and I can see white space and big black boxes (perhaps in place of code areas?) instead of page content.
Yeah, what I find ironic is that very often the more someone tries to make their web site suited for mobile devices the less convenient it is to actually use those sites on mobile devices. Mobile browsers are made to cope with regular sites (unoptimized for the mobile world) and they do it well enough most of the time. However, when authors try to cater too much for mobile then there are problems like some content unavailable, something doesn’t work or some very high browser/os/hardware requirements and instead of making the web more accessible it is actually made less accessible - unfortunately this has happened with these forums. It’s a shame because I like some of the new features here but I highly value accessibility of web sites as well.
So for now sitepoint is no more for me on my mobile phone but I’ll be lurking around on my desktop and see how it goes. And I hope the accessibility issues can be addressed - but really I don’t have much hope for the reasons I explain in my recent post.
That is weird, as I don’t have that problem with Chrome at all… (and I have several extensions enabled too).
I’m running Chrome Version 37.0.2062.120 m (and on Linux, I’m running version 37.0.2062.94 because 120 has a nasty flash player bug in it which causes it to crash repeatedly)
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear - I was talking about Chrome on my mobile (and Opera mobile). Chrome on my desktop works fine, however it’s slower than Firefox. Opera webkit (desktop) is somewhere in between.
Ah, Okay, I’m slowly catching on (caffeine has been started now too).
Although, I haven’t had “that slow” of an experience, but I will be testing it here real soon, to get an idea. I do know on a few occasions, I gave up trying to read a topic/post (when on mobile) because it wasn’t loading… so that I’ve definitely seen.
Edit: My results:
Load Categories page (from bookmarks screen) - 30 seconds
Go to Latest tab (all categories) - 8 seconds
Go to “Welcome to the new Sitepoint Forums” - 11 seconds
Back to Latest (using back key) - 7 seconds
Load True/False game - 11 seconds
Load Unread section - 4 seconds
Load Notifications - 2 seconds
Go to Categories page - 10 seconds
All of this was on my LTE 4G connection (not using Wifi).
I’ll run another test later tonight.
Yesterday I had serious problems with both the notification box and the forums in general.