Questions about the new Skritter forum

This new forum software is probably really cool, but of course, as someone used to the old Skritter forum, I am a bit confused, so I’ll test the new software by whining a bit about it :smile:

For people coming from the old forum, it would be nice to have some information about the new forum software:

  • why a new forum?
  • how do I do things I used to do?

Things I wonder how to do on the new forum:

  • how do I see a person’s Info and Stats?
  • how do I request email notifications of new posts on a thread?

My general impression so far:

  • the new forum software feels confusing, generic, and impersonal compared to the old forum.
    (who took the nice, cozy, friendly Skritter forum and replaced it with phpBB?!)
    (but don’t mind me, I always complain about new things…)

And just for testing, here are two versions of a link, which I hope will both work:

To answer my own question, it looks like emails are sent automatically. This can be controlled in your Preferences (top right button).

It’s still not clear to me whether there’s a way to be notified by email of replies to a thread that you also replied to.

Ah ok you have to do it manually. For every thread, you can set how closely you want to monitor it. If you set it to “Watched”, you get an email for every post in the thread.

Hi, I can answer your questions!

Why a new Forum

Because the old forum is old, and we decided the simplest way to upgrade it and get a lot more features was by switching to this exciting new forum software.

Why discourse in particular? Well, Nick, George and I have been using it for two years with CodeCombat and we’ve been really happy with it. Also, programmers in general are big fans of Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Overflow which is an amazingly well designed system for communicating answers to common programming questions. Discourse is his more recent project to encourage good, reasonable discussions within specific communities through a system of trust and leveling up. Check out this recent interview with Jeff where he explains in depth what he’s trying to do with this software, particularly about minute 20 onward (the first part he talks about Stack Overflow).

Person’s Info and Stats

That has not been carried over to the new system. I didn’t see a quick and easy way to do that, but that’s something we can look into in the future, especially if it was important to a lot of people!

I hope that answers all your questions! Looks like your other questions you answered yourself :smile:

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How do you change your avatar? There doesn’t seem to be an option for that in the preferences. Also, I changed it on the old website but those changes didn’t carry over.

It looks like it should be in the preferences, under the email setting and above the profile background setting. Is it not showing up?

It displays the image, but there’s no edit tool.

That’s correct, there isn’t a way to edit in your profile settings here. I’ve got it set up to just take your image from the site, rather than using discourse’s own image upload tool. However, it’s got your old image cached. It should switch over time. I took a stab at trying to make it update the image each time you log in, but that doesn’t appear to be working, it causes logins to fail. I don’t see any documentation about when the cache should refresh, but let’s wait and see if it doesn’t take too long, and I’ll keep seeing if there’s another way to invalidate the cache.

I’d like to be able to see person’s info and stats :slight_smile:

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Those are important information to help us better answer a question about the language, especially if that person is new to the forum.

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I like the forum. But I would like it even more if the links open in a new window or browser tab. Because I frequently “lose” the forum if I clicked on a link, I would appreciate if you could just add a “target=_blank” to the links - though it is not HTML5 compliant. :smile:

Ctrl click or middle click?

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thanks for the tip, Ximeng. With my old mouse I always used the middle click, but it didn’t work anymore with the new mouse that I bought yesterday. :slight_smile: but Ctrl-Click opens a new window/tab for me. I didn’t know this trick.

New links should now open in a new browser tab! If not, you can enable this under your personal preferences on Discourse.

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Yes, that works! Thank you.

I’ve just fixed this. If you log out of discourse and log in again, your picture will update to whatever your Skritter avatar is.

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