I found the old forum are 10x more user friendly than discourse, discourse is too fancy for me and hard for me to focus on the text threaded content, sigh.
I'm sorry to hear that you do not like it. Maybe consider using the mail interface if the forum is too hard to read for your taste.
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A week ago I really hated it, but now feel it's more different than anything else.
I find that if I start from the "Latest" view it's much easier to work with. Posts are one liners by last activity, bold is unread. I do really like the redish "Last Visit" line.
https://forum.openwrt.org/latest
If you choose a category, then it defaults to the Latest selection for the Category.
This is the current equivalent of the OpenWRT General Discussion.
https://forum.openwrt.org/c/general
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+1 for that observation. I have bookmarked the "latest" page myself, as it provides a nice quick overview to the active discussions. It is by far the most useful one of the available "menu items".
Yep. I don't like it. The more I use this forum the more I hate it.
I just submitted a new message. I had to add spam to my title to meet the 15-character requirement.
The problem is Discourse itself. It's very hipster-brogrammer.ly. Dark patterns everywhere. Designed by people who work in the advert industry.
I wrote up a longer rant about it, but nobody cares. Delete, stop visiting, move on.
I agree with ledeme. To be honest, the default Discourse layout is definitely bothersome. For some reason it doesn't have a "readability" feel to it. Not to say Discourse is a terrible software, I just believe with some modifications to the CSS, it will be fine.
Sites to compare:
https://discuss.howtogeek.com/
Just spend a few minutes on each website, then go back to the Discourse for LEDE and you'll know what I mean (hopefully)
CSS can't save it for me, just too much eye-candy for an embedded guy like me whose daily interface is normally dumb terminal windows, any old forum is better than discourse IMHO, or just the one used on openwrt is fine.
actually does discourse have a CLI interface that I can use?
@ledeme - discourse has a bidirectional mail interface which you can use, that should be enough for casual reading.
@komawoyo - unfortunately I do not know what you mean. I see that there is more white space which would then upset other people in this thread. Apart from that it has the very same clutter or even more of it like the thread summary bar which we disabled through CSS.
I do not really know what about the PunBB would be better apart from the fact that it forces arbitrary paging into a thread.
@komawoyo Thanks for your comments, but I want to say that I'm not sure what you mean, either.
Specifically, they're both Discourse sites. Their admins have chosen the "Latest" view to be the default view. You can look at LEDE this way by bookmarking this page: https://forum.openwrt.org/latest
The LEDE admins made an explicit choice to use the Category view for the main page, since that mimics the OpenWrt forum. (The Latest view lets you read the full firehose of all postings.)
Please let me know if I have missed your point... Thanks.
[quote="richb-hanover, post:10, topic:174"]
The LEDE admins made an explicit choice to use the Category view for the main page, since that mimics the OpenWrt forum. (The Latest view lets you read the full firehose of all postings.)
[/quote]That decision might be reviewed. At least I use only the "latest" view, as it offers a nice compact overview to the recent discussion.
Similarly, on Openwrt forum I use almost only "New posts" link: https://forum.openwrt.org/search.php?action=show_new
Alternative there might be "Active posts" that works also for unregistered users: https://forum.openwrt.org/search.php?action=show_recent
In my opinion, the category screen as the main thing does not offer much value if you visit the forum regularly. But it may offer more for a newcomer, so it has its place, I guess.
I think you just nailed it. I care intensely about newcomers, and I think the selection of five categories helps to orient them to the possibilities in the forum.
In a certain sense, I don't "worry about" regular visitors, since they're familiar with all the options and most useful views. As long as they can make minor changes to their behavior to be effective (say, bookmarking a different forum page as a starting point), I am happy. (Analogy: Even though the default browser and .bashrc file are perfectly fine, we all customize those, too.)
So, all you veteran LEDE folks: Bookmark this page 
https://forum.openwrt.org/latest Or tell us about a start page that you prefer!
PS I'm not opposed to changing anything here, but I want it to be done thoughtfully, with a decision that the change really makes things better. And I'm going to stick up for newcomers, who never get a voice in these kinds of discussions... Thanks.
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I'm of the same opinion.
@tmomas @komawoyo @hnyman @RangerZ @richb-hanover @jow @jmomo @ledeme
I like many things about this discourse forum, as it draws you into other (related) topics.
And there are many features that support community stuff, though i think this will become more usefull once there is more activity, more topics, more users.
And i have seen a few features that are not used yet, but will be very usefull in the future,
On the other hand, the different layout takes some time to get used to.
But once you are used to it then this is going to be the new normal i guess..
On another forum i also noticed that users can get credentials and get permission to edit topic, or move topics to help clean up little issues and unload the moderators form tasks like that.
Please. Do something about this horrible plain white background. Invent a color scheme. A greenish, blueish or other pastel-colored background, and messages with alternating grey or slightly colored tints.
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I actually love Discourse forum. I find it very user friendly, it's easy to navigate and it actually helps a lot to keep track of discussions.
Really? I prefer the default high contrast black on white a lot, color will reduce the luminosity contrast and hence the readability under low light conditions. There is a reason why most books use white(ish) paper and dark ink...
Books don't have light sources in them. It would also help in visually parsing the discussion if the messages would have alternating background colors.
Here is another Discourse forum. Even a slight tint, like the one used here, would make it better.
Also, about low light conditions, the opposite is true. The eye is even more sensitive to the bright white background when it is compared to the surrounding darkness. Why do you think the "night mode" of mobile phones has white text on dark background?
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to save power on oled devices? xD
IMHO that is garish, but I agree that is a matter of taste and I am not claiming mine to be better than others' just different. Then again giving every other post a slight background does increase the (admittedly already quite visible) "separation between posts".
Ignore night mode as there the goals seem to be:
a) to keep the eye adapted to the dark surround (to avoid night blindness epochs after looking at the screen)
b) to avoid light pollution into the surround that might distract others from say sleeping...
My point is that readability is best for black on white everything else waters down the contrast. Now admittedly the eye will adapt to lower luminosity, but typically temporal and/or spatial resolution will suffer as part of the adaptation...
Best Regards