I don’t really mind the white space… in fact I find it easier to read posts on here than FW which uses a much wider area for text. It’s easier on my eyes not to have to jump from the far right of the screen to the far left at every new line.
Overall, I think the current layout is pretty decent and it looks great on mobile. I really dig the notification alerts in the top right corner over my avatar.
Minor gripes:
No method of giving red/disliking a post or topic.
Can’t see who last replied to a thread from the forum topic list without hovering over their avatar.
Can’t see who started a thread from the forum topic list without hovering over their avatar.
Can’t sort by newest threads first (my default sort on FW). Though this is not much of an issue right now due to the smaller size of FD.
Age of thread not displayed in forum topic list without hovering over “last activity”.
Even with the nitpicking above, I think discourse is a good fit for now.
I actually don’t have an issue with this or the software that Phatwallet uses so I’m at a loss when people complains bitterly about either of them. Oh well.
I agree. I think they’re both pretty “slick” relative to traditional forum software. I do think I prefer this one just a bit, as it seems more polished. And you can see the obvious copy-cat features across both platforms, even design wise.
I wanted to bring this other option to the admin’s attention because it’s open source, free, feature rich, and actively developed:
I’m not affiliated with it at all. I just was doing some research on the forum software options out there and this seems to be the best right now in my opinion.
Atmittedly, I’m not super experienced with it but my past experience has made me hate it. Specifically, since it doesn’t load all thread comments or paginate them, but instead loads as you scroll, so it breaks browser-based search. (And I guess is aware since it captures ctrl-F, but to me that’s shitty too…)
Hitting ctrl+f twice will close the topic/site search and open the browser search, at least in Firefox. It is, of course, pointless if you didn’t pre-load all of the comments on the page.
Thankfully the topic/site search dialog has a checkbox to limit the search to current topic, and I believe it remembers this value.
I’ll try to keep using it to see if it is an acquired taste, but so far, the more I use it the less I like it.
Feels too much like it is made for a mobile phone, with a finger-scrolling method. But I usually view forums on a desktop, and I see way too much whitespace, and there’s only room for 3 or 4 posts per page, which is ridiculous for long threads. It becomes a scroll-fest.
I do more forum searching while I am wasting time at work, so I’d prefer forum software that looks like Outlook or Excel or anything that basically look likes work if someone walks by. Is that a possibility?
Good searching, voting (and seeing who voted), sticky threads, and being able to see how many new posts since you last read the thread were IMO key to the Fatwallet Finance experience. I have no idea if this board software or any other does this well, but I thought I would throw that out here.
I use a laptop exclusively for this, so tendencies toward “responsive design” aimed at tablets and mobile with extra white space is a negative.
I do like it a bit more than the first times I tried it, but, really, without the ratings it is not even close to the old usability. And I am not talking just about topic ratings of course, post ratings are at least as important…
The huge white space is a bit annoying, it becomes better when I open the site on my portrait display, although the all-white theme is still tiring for me personally. *Edit, switched to the dark theme. I will not complain that this one is too dark instead, before I have tried it for a while
