General observations about this forum.
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.
List of discussion
- On the
/forumpage, 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.
Create a new Discussion
- The Markdown preview toggle button should have short-cut key options so that the user can easily preview it. e.g. Laracast use
cmd+/for mac user.
Reply to a discussion
- If you add a "reply" button at the bottom of every reply, it would be better to reply easily. Currently, you have a reply button on the parent "reply" section only. No child discussion contains a "reply" button.
- (Nice to have): If you include ❤️ or 👍 option so that community contributors will be inspired to answer more.
User Profile
-
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.
Access discussions via category.
Currently, discussions are not accessible via category. It will be better if you consider this as well.
Markdown support.
Currently, the markdown is not supporting fully ( I guess). For example, the h3 is supporting only, none of the heading supports here.
For example-
H1
H2
H3
H4
H5
H6
I know, it will be time-consuming to complete the whole forum as a one man army
Looking forward.
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
@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
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 😊
Hi again @alex
Another point:
-
The discussion view counter is not really working.
- Is it cached?
- Or do you track count per user instead of page refresh?
If I refresh the page, it doesn't really reflect on the counter.
Please take note of that.
@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!
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!
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.
- People posting for the sake of increasing their post count.
- People rushing with their replies to get the best answer award.
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.
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.
Some updates from your suggestions @tisuchi. I'm working on the lighter theme in conjunction with these, I've not forgotten!
- The entire discussion on the index is now clickable, with slighted muted description (until hover) for better title readability.
- Reply button added for child replies
- Likes added with a firework animation, because... why not? ✌️
- Markdown headings have been corrected. The markdown toolbar still defaults to an h3, but h1 through h5 are available and styled correctly now.
In response to some of your other suggestions:
- When you said "discussions are not accessible via category", what do you mean? There is a dropdown on the forum index that allows filtering by topic. Did you mean something else?
- Leaderboard functionality was actually already completed before the launch, it's just hidden.
@alex
First of all, great job man. 🎉🎉🎉
When you said "discussions are not accessible via category", what do you mean? There is a dropdown on the forum index that allows filtering by topic. Did you mean something else?
I mean, make questions accessible via category URL.
For example, if I visit forum/feedback then I should be able to see a list of all questions of feedback category.
@alex Can you disable this? You could actually disable all of them.
https://i.imgur.com/zDarsMr.png
autocomplete="off"
autocorrect="off"
autocapitalize="off"
spellcheck="false"
@haz Curious to know, does it really make any difference if he turns off these?
As I understand, it's a fuzzy search therefore it finds the most possible matches.
Correct me if I am wrong @alex
It's just annoying and it doesn't provide anything of use since the search provides suggestions already.
Another point:
Redirecting after adding a new reply should bring me the newly created reply.
How to reproduce?
- Go to this question
- Click reply to discussion button on the top right corner
- Add a test reply
- It doesn't redirect you anywhere. But the reply is added to the bottom of the discussion (in this scenario, it's added on the last page of the pagination).
My expectation is to redirect me to the place where my new reply was added. Isn't that the right expectation @alex ?
I noticed this a moment ago when replying. Seems like a bug since I updated some of the notification redirect stuff. On it!
@tisuchi This has now been fixed. Apologies if you were spammed by email notifications about new posts!
@alex Good to see your prompt update.
No worries. I love to get the update and share my idea too 😊
Just added the markdown shortcut when composing. This is currently Ctrl + Shift + V just because it's the VSCode shortcut, and causes less conflict with the / for the global search shortcut. I'm happy to change this if it makes sense to use something else.
The shortcut visual is hidden on smaller screens (mobile) for obvious reasons, so if you're viewing on a smaller screen, you won't see it next to the toggle.
Hi @alex,
Love the shortcut however, it conflicts with the Awesome Screenshot browser extension (opening a new tab and redirecting). I know you can't account for all browser extensions, but this is (I assume) a widely used browser extension. Though to be honest, I don't really use it since moving to Mac so I am going to actually remove it. Just something to be aware of. I wonder if there is there a way to make it so that it doesn't emit up to the browser though?
Ah damn it. I'll rethink the key binding for this. Tbh I didn't put any thought into it and just went with the VSCode shortcut that I'm used to (and assumed others would be).
Leave it with me!
Poor Alex. Getting bombarded with bugs and requests. He's doing a superb job, this is what makes Codecourse forum so awesome!
@alex I love to add another point.
Currently, if a link adds to the discussion, it doesn't make it clickable. For example https://codecourse.com/forum
(Just an opinion) Wouldn't it be better to make it clickable automatically?
Yeah, I agree. Also if you select the link and click the "Link" icon in the markup toolbar, it doesn't prefill the name using the URL.
@tisuchi Thanks, this is just a markdown toggle so I'll get that sorted.
@haz What do you mean by prefilling the name?
Like so:
codecourse.com
|[codecourse.com]|(url)|
As I already typed codecourse.com and selected it to make it a link, it should ideally put the text where the (url) is.
Also, it shows an icon when creating a link, is it possible to open that in a new tab?
Found a really weird bug (double pagination). Check the images. First of all, I didn't see any other post in the thread until I went back to edit my post with visual tutorials. Then the UI looked a bit messed up. Sorry @tisuchi, didn't mean to post the same as you. I didn't see your post. The last reply was showing 2 days ago.
@haz I think it's intention. So that users can straight away navigate to the next page.
At least it's my understanding.
Ah yeah, I just checked some other threads and they have it as well. I think it just looks a bit strange with that thread as the top level post has no replies (nested).
It does look strange when there are only a couple of replies. The idea was exactly what @tisuchi mentioned, it's just so you can navigate easily either at the top or the bottom.
Perhaps pagination should be hidden if there are < x replies?
Another feature request for the future: It would be great if there was a setting (persisted) to show the posts in chronological order? Alternatively, you can make it go to the last page when clicking on a thread. It can get a bit annoying having to keep scrolling and clicking through to the last page just to read posts. imagine a thread with 10+ pages.
Thanks for the suggestion about chronological.
FYI if you click the 'last reply' text on any discussion in the index it'll jump to the last post. I should make that clearer!