Hi @alex
I have been using laracasts forum over the last 7 years and I am one of the active users there. Based on my experience with Laracasts, I listed down the following opinions that might be helpful if you can implement them.
/forum
page, currently, the discussion title is clickable only. To open a discussion, need to click on the title particularly.From the user's point of view, I believe it will be better to make clickable the whole div section of each question so that it can be accessed easily.
cmd+/
for mac user.Maybe you can think for user's profile accessibility publicly that what Laracast does. Maybe the profile contains # of course completed, # of total best answers, and total experience that you currently showing in /dashboard
.
Maybe applying some rankings will help people to contribute to this forum. In addition, adding leaderboard will give some recognition to users for intuitive contribution.
Currently, discussions are not accessible via category. It will be better if you consider this as well.
Currently, the markdown is not supporting fully ( I guess). For example, the h3 is supporting only, none of the heading supports here.
For example-
I know, it will be time-consuming to complete the whole forum as a one man army
Looking forward.
also I made mention of not receiving an email when a user reply to a topic
@kikter I support your idea. 👍
I'm literally working on this right now 🤝
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! I agree with every point here and I'll be working on these shortly. Feel free to add anything else you come across!
👍
@alex another point.
It seems /forum
is only accessible via the authenticated users. It might be a good approach to make it open for all to read all questions and answers.
It’s currently closed to specific members while I gather this feedback
Totally agree.
Make sense.
@alex I think you can put theme switcher is in your top priority.
It's really hard for me to read and track with this dark theme.
Please consider it. 😊
Once I’m done with discussion notifications (pretty much ready to deploy), I’ll start on the theme switcher
Too kind sir, too kind.
it took some time for laracast to implement the follow feature , I think it's a nice feature to have here
@kikter I totally agree.
I saw the laracast progress day by day. Surely it was not like overnight magic!
Another point @alex
If I click on reply button for any comment, it would be better if you tag that comment owner automatically.
I think it will be more user-friendly 😊
I support this
Hi again @alex
Another point:
The discussion view counter is not really working.
If I refresh the page, it doesn't really reflect on the counter.
Please take note of that.
It’s per unique IP
@alex hmm..
Isn't that view count? If so, does it appropriate to track by unique IP instead of refresh count?
I guess I was going for 'the amount of people who have viewed this discussion'. I think using the amount of times the discussion has been clicked on or refreshed would show a huge amount of views.
I see what you mean. I'll add this to the backlog to consider. Thanks again!
❤️
"Emoji" to explain and show reactions which is very important in social networks.
I've just added the ability to like posts, and I think we'll be leaving it at that for now. Thanks for the suggestion though!
@alex Good job. ❤️
Another observation @alex
Currently, email notifications are always sent from you (alex@codecourse.com).
From my point of view, I think it would be better to use a general email from the domain instead of you.
Ahaha I noticed this was a bit weird earlier when I kept getting emails from myself. I'll change this up for forum notifications specifically, since from the main site it makes sense for the emails to come from me.
Thanks for the feedback!
I'm actually not a fan of the animations. They are great for the first 10 actions, but it's getting a bit annoying. At least on mobile. May I suggest a profile setting to disable them? Alternatively you could make it random?
Regarding the leaderboards. What's the plan with those? I'm worried that it will make things too competitively focused.
I get the incentive though. I would much prefer a system similar to SO. That way, everyone can be rewarded.
Thanks for the feedback on the animations. I really like them, but understand they could be annoying. Let’s keep it in mind and wait for more feedback.
The leaderboard currently pulls from the most best answers, but this can easily be changed since it’s just a query that pulls from data. I’ll do some research and figure out how other forums handle this.
Eventually XP will be given for best answers, etc, so once profiles are live, it could just be XP/badges instead of a single leaderboard.
Because the forum is new, I really need to encourage discussion and participation, but of course, not at the expense of low quality posts.
To clarify further: The animations are not so annoying on desktop. I think the problem with mobile is that the animation takes up way too much of the viewport height, even if it is just for a very short amount of time.
I totally agree with you @haz
It doesn't have any issue with the desktop version.
However, in my personal opinion, most developers use a big screen, at least a laptop screen in order interact to with this forum. It's arguable. But still, I will say so.
Gotcha, thanks guys
Yeah, that's true. Though since we are doing a lot of testing, I've actually been using my mobile much more. It's not a huge problem though.