Connect IQ forum issues

Just want to quickly summarize all the issues I've experienced with the new forums (as nice as they are). I think some of these issues make it very hard to deal with long discussions, such as app support threads in the Showcase. One of my users mentioned they don't like the new forums, because it's hard to jump to the latest reply in a discussion.

Reply notifications are not sent, except for replies in the Connect IQ bug reports section.
Infinite scroll makes it very hard to deal with topics that have hundreds of replies (e.g. dozens of pages in the old view.)
Suggested fix: Please bring back thread pagination, at least as an option
When sorting by newest (or scrolling to the end), new replies to old replies are not displayed chronologically. A recent reply to a comment from a few weeks ago will not be seen in a busy thread. I realize that there is a link to the latest reply in the thread list, but that only works if the reply in question is the very latest. As soon as someone else posts a reply, that other reply will be lost. And there is no way to jump to the latest reply when you're already viewing the thread (e.g. by clicking on a link)
Suggested fix:
A) Have combo of flat/threaded display, where you see threaded replies AND replies in chronological order (like NodeBB -- e.g. https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/12236/the-official-status-thread -- that thread has 100k replies which would be completely untenable with these forums -- it works there because of the combo flat/threaded display, and the pagination.)
B) Since A will probably never happen, please allow the option of viewing threads in flat mode
The combo of 1, 2 and 3 means that it is very possible for replies to a long thread to be completely missed by the TC, which is a shame
Cannot search individual threads
Crucial editor features are missing in mobile (e.g. quote, code)
Can't edit quoted text at all
Replies are not threaded after the 3rd level of replies. Instead of being properly nested (reply under parent comment), they are flattened out and displayed in the current sort order (e.g. ascending/descending by time). This makes it hard or impossible to follow the original discussion, unless you click on the parent links. I realize that too much indentation is hard to read -- I like the way reddit handles this situation, where deeply nested replies are marked with dots instead of indentation.
Can't edit replies in the CIQ bug reports section
Replies in the CIQ bug reports section have both upvotes/downvotes and likes (which seems confusing)
Upvotes/downvotes are public (usernames are shown), which may discourage people from using that feature (at least downvotes). (I realize that only names are shown, and not whether they pressed "upvote" or "downvote". But it will be obvious if a comment's score is -1 and there's only one voter, for example)
Topic "like count" is not visible when signed out, nor is it visible from the topic list, which makes it hard to see which topics are popular

EDIT:

Forum topic list does not show the topic creator, only the last person who replied to a topic. (Thanks, markdotai)

If anyone else feels that these are issues, please like/reply to this thread. Thanks for reading!

Top Replies

markdotai over 6 years ago +1

Those all seem like good points to me!

Not an issue as such, but one thing I have noticed I miss on the new forum format, is that on the list of threads it doesn't say who started each thread, it only…

All Replies

markdotai over 6 years ago

Those all seem like good points to me!

Not an issue as such, but one thing I have noticed I miss on the new forum format, is that on the list of threads it doesn't say who started each thread, it only says who made the last post. In theory it shouldn't matter who started a thread, and I should just decide to read it based on the thread title, and what that implies about the content within the thread. But sometimes it is nice to see that so-and-so started such-and-such a thread, so I'll have a read of it

flowstate over 6 years ago in reply to markdotai

Good one! I noticed that before but forgot to mention it here.

I do think the person who created a thread is pretty important. I think there’s very few social media platforms or forums (old or new) where you can’t tell who posted something at a glance.

flowstate over 6 years ago

To elaborate on why the the lack of threading in deeper levels of threaded replies is an issue, especially because the flattened part is sorted the same way as the rest of the discussion, I'll post a quick repro case / example which is how I experience it.

1) User clicks on "Newest" to see the latest post in a long thread

2) User looks at convo which looks something like this (I've added some numbers to show the nesting/reading order):

1: Top-level reply
2: Reply to 1
5: Reply to 4
4: Reply to 3
3: Reply to 2

The problem here is that a flat view of deeper levels of nested replies doesn't really work unless it's sorted from oldest to newest, because that's how you're always viewing the first two levels of replies (regardless of how the entire topic is sorted).

And there's the other obvious problem when you have multiple replies to a 2nd-level reply - e.g.

1: Top-level reply
  2: Reply to 1
  4: Reply to 3
  3a: 2nd Reply to 2
  3: Reply to 2

Now it's pretty hard to tell follow the convo because you can't tell who's replying to what, regardless of the sort order.

My suggested fix is to display threaded replies the same way that reddit does:

Use dots for deeper levels of indentation
Always display lower-level replies in deeper levels of indentation from oldest to newest. In other words, the chosen sort order should only apply to top-level replies, not threaded replies

e.g.
1: Top-level reply
2: Reply to 1
• 3: Reply to 2
•• 4: Reply to 3
• 3b: 2nd Reply to 2

flowstate over 6 years ago

Another issue with notifications -- the notifications that do work (in the bug report section) seem to expire after a while. So you can't go back and view your entire notification history even if you click "View All". So even if we were able to see all notifications (e.g. replies to comments, replies to threads, etc.), it would be impossible to view our entire history, which would allow us to see replies to our posts in reverse chronological order (which is a nice feature in Reddit, for example).