On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
> So, even though I wanted to get away with using stackoverflow.com

A bunch of us are on stackoverflow too, and it could use some more stuff. I like SO for archiving too, even if you get an answer here, SO is a lot easier to search so copying the answer to there to be a clean reference for later might be worthwhile.

> phpBB

I used to be a pretty heavy phpbb user and the #1 feature I wished it had was a better email interface. You can turn on subscriptions and get some notifications, but I wanted it to just include the text of the post in the email too!

The reason is that I like to keep up on basically all posts. I don't necessarily read them all, but I do skim everything posted on the learn, general, and announce groups. Everything.

On a web forum, the time spent clicking and loading links would actually make that pretty painful (I do still do it on some low traffic phpbb sites tho), and getting the notifications can have lag between responding.

With email, I know within a few minutes of a post that it was there, and I can skim it in a matter of seconds from any location that I'm online.


I understand though that the casual user isn't interested in following everything so this isn't as important to everyone else... but it is a major plus for me.

> 1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post anymore.

I think you meant "editing" ;)

But I didn't like edits on phpbb either because they are really hard to see. There's no notification of an edit and finding the before and after difference is just really painful.

So I prefer the follow-up post anyway, unless perhaps it is within a few minutes and the post hasn't actually been read by anyone yet. On phpbb, I would proofread stuff with preview before sending. Here... well, I don't do that, and I think we should just encourage that by making the "Send" button actually be "Preview" - force them to see it before hitting the final send.

> 2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:

Yeah, this is terrible, but it is bad form to over quote anyway, including on phpbb. You should quote just enough to jog the reader's memory of the topic, and cut the rest out. If you need the parent, the "in reply to" link on the side (or in the email) can pull it back up in full.

So I generally just ignore most quoted things in posts.

> 3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support.

You can always write *this*. Or [b]this[/b]. It might not be automatically rendered, but the reader will know what you meant.

> 4.  No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to post more than 5 lines of code.

So for this, I almost always use ddoc style:

---
code here
---

And again, it isn't automatically rendered, but we know what it means.

> 5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be helpful to communicate problems.

yeah. links to images are ok though.

> 6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for threads so we can locate related threads easily.

and I'm meh on this just because I don't think a forum is really useful for referencing later anyway. There's some value in the archive if you really want to see people's old arguments, but for stuff like Q&A, I'd rather copy/paste that end result over to Stack Overflow.

> I would like to enjoy a full joy of using the forum, like you are having.

So I use the emails for most reading. Only go on the web interface to post (the email reply thing is buggy. I'd really rather use it though), or to navigate old stuff/share existing links.

On 2/23/18 8:47 AM, biocyberman wrote:
> Want to learn something from you guys.
> 
> forum.dlang.org is by far the biggest gathering point for Dlang users. So, even though I wanted to get away with using stackoverflow.com, I have to come back here. However, to me it easier for me, I would like to know how you guys get comfortable with using the forum?
> 
>  From my experience with forum platforms like vBulletin, phpBB, Invision Power, and even interfaces of Google group, and Github Issues, I still find it very difficult to understand the logics of using dlang's forum. FYI, I am not a new user of internet, I'd rather consider myself someone can take pain to learn new useful things. And I've administered some forums myself. Yet I would like to name a few things below. They may irritate some hard-working contributors of dlang community. But I by no means want to make this a discussion of hate. So, how do you guys overcome these problems:

thunderbird NNTP client.

> 
> =====
> 1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post anymore.

Meh, its possible with NNTP, but this also allows abuse of editing. I don't find this that horrible. Maybe pay attention to the spelling corrector?

> 
> 2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
>   >First post quoted
>   >>Second post quoted
>   >>>Third post quoted
>   >>Second post quoted
> .....

Thunderbird substitutes those with nice colored bars, so I can easily see the level of quotes.

> 
> 3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support. Some tools to emphasize important points will make it easier to let the readers know what the posters want to say.

TB has these, though I prefer plain text. It supports a crude form of markdown, so *bold*, _underline_ all are enhanced by TB. Emoticons turn into graphics too ;)

> 4.  No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to post more than 5 lines of code.

You can use a link to a code sample on https://run.dlang.io/ which allows your code to be tested in the browser as a bonus.

> 
> 5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be helpful to communicate problems.

Yeah, this is a limitation I'm not sure how it can be overcome.

> 6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for threads so we can locate related threads easily.

If you want to tag posts on your own, TB does this.

-Steve

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 14:47:00 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:55:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> And none of the features that you're talking about really make sense when you're dealing with NNTP or a mailing list. It's all just plain text.
>
> Well, nntp actually supports basically all that stuff: you can do multipart/alternative for rich text and mime attachments for inline images, all kinds of stuff. I think it might even allow editing in the protocol, though propagating that to email users might be bizarre (still doable though).
>
> So it isn't *actually* a technical limitation... though a lot of us might never use those features because we do interface with it as a plain text thing.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure editing is in there because Pan[1] provided the option when I used it.

Actually Pan is a really great way to read the D news groups, but as I started to access the forums from many different places it was just easier to let the web track messages I'd read. (Pan even supports some markdown (bold and such)).


1. http://pan.rebelbase.com/

I didn't mean the human part, meant the forum's functionality.
Ali wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
>> Want to learn something from you guys.
> 
>> I would like to know how you guys get comfortable with using the forum?
> 
> Dlang forum in my opinion, is one of the most tolerant and friendly programming language forums
> 
> So the experience is not really just how you edit a post
> it is also how friendly, responsive and friendly everyone else is
> 
> I think it is too late to migrate to a new platform,
> plus if they ever introduce, say a discourse based forum like rust or ocaml
> the community (already small) might end up divided
> 
> 

So far so much better :)

I really appreciate all answers given so far. Sorry I haven't found a way to reply to everyone.

Many seems to be using the forum's web interface as a second - tier of interaction. I still don't know what can justify this practice.  But anyway, for the time being I downloaded seamonkey (because I was searching for a NNTP client). I actually find it easier to read the 'forum' in Seamonkey.

As a test, I am replying directly through Seamonkey.


Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 2/23/18 8:47 AM, biocyberman wrote:
>> Want to learn something from you guys.
>>
>> forum.dlang.org is by far the biggest gathering point for Dlang users. So, even though I wanted to get away with using stackoverflow.com, I have to come back here. However, to me it easier for me, I would like to know how you guys get comfortable with using the forum?
>>
>>  From my experience with forum platforms like vBulletin, phpBB, Invision Power, and even interfaces of Google group, and Github Issues, I still find it very difficult to understand the logics of using dlang's forum. FYI, I am not a new user of internet, I'd rather consider myself someone can take pain to learn new useful things. And I've administered some forums myself. Yet I would like to name a few things below. They may irritate some hard-working contributors of dlang community. But I by no means want to make this a discussion of hate. So, how do you guys overcome these problems:
> 
> thunderbird NNTP client.
> 
>>
>> =====
>> 1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post anymore.
> 
> Meh, its possible with NNTP, but this also allows abuse of editing. I don't find this that horrible. Maybe pay attention to the spelling corrector?
> 
>>
>> 2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
>>   >First post quoted
>>   >>Second post quoted
>>   >>>Third post quoted
>>   >>Second post quoted
>> .....
> 
> Thunderbird substitutes those with nice colored bars, so I can easily see the level of quotes.
> 
>>
>> 3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support. Some tools to emphasize important points will make it easier to let the readers know what the posters want to say.
> 
> TB has these, though I prefer plain text. It supports a crude form of markdown, so *bold*, _underline_ all are enhanced by TB. Emoticons turn into graphics too ;)
> 
>> 4.  No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to post more than 5 lines of code.
> 
> You can use a link to a code sample on https://run.dlang.io/ which allows your code to be tested in the browser as a bonus.
> 
>>
>> 5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be helpful to communicate problems.
> 
> Yeah, this is a limitation I'm not sure how it can be overcome.
> 
>> 6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for threads so we can locate related threads easily.
> 
> If you want to tag posts on your own, TB does this.
> 
> -Steve

On Friday, February 23, 2018 15:03:01 jmh530 via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:55:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > dlang's "forum" is really a newsgroup. It's accessible via NNTP, mailing list, and the web interface. Many of us never use the web interface, and the functionality in the web interface is limited, because all it's doing is posting to the NNTP server and fetching the messages from there to display in the web interface.
> >
> > And none of the features that you're talking about really make sense when you're dealing with NNTP or a mailing list. It's all just plain text.
> >
> > - Jonathan M Davis
>
> With the recent grumbling about receiving newsgroup posts in gmail, it occurs to me that I have no idea how to even do that. I imagine I could figure out Thunderbird if I bothered, but I primarily use the forum.

If you want to use gmail, then just follow the "mailing list" link in the web interface and sign up. I wouldn't suggest using gmail though, because it's "helpful" and doesn't deliver an e-mails from the mailing list that you send to the mailing list. That probably displays okay in gmail itself, because it probably inserts the messages from your sent folder into the thread, but if you then ever use an e-mail client, threading is screwed, because all of your posts are missing. And threading isn't going to be all that great in gmail, because its threading is linear, whereas e-mail threads are actually a tree.

If you want to use NNTP, then you'll have to find a tutorial somewhere on NNTP readers. I used to use KDE's newsgroup reader, knode, years ago, but I got sick of it not being able to track what I'd read across machines, whereas if you using the mailing list with an e-mail client set up to use IMAP, then every machine which accesses your e-mail is synced with regards to what you've read. I'm not aware of any advantage to using NNTP over the mailing list, but some folks do prefer to use NNTP, and if you use Thunderbird, you can use it for either e-mail on NNTP.

Maybe the web interface should have more instructions for using alternate interfaces, but the mailing list is pretty self-explanatory, and it's not that hard to search how to use NNTP if you care.

> Maybe the forum could add a read me at the top that gives instructions on others ways to access it with a note that most of the regular users interact that way (and how this functionality leads to things like not being able to edit forum posts). This would probably reduce the number of threads like this.

For some reason, the fact that it's using NNTP is only one of the "random tips" that the front page of the web interface cycles through:

'Random tip: Much of this forum's content is also available via classic mailing lists or NNTP - see the "Also via" column on the forum index.'

It should probably be more explicit about that. I doubt that it would ultimately fix the problem of folks complaining about wanting improvements to the web interface as if it were discourse or something though. That would require folks to pay more attention than many folks seem to, and the more text you provide explaining the details, the more likely the are to ignore the whole explanation.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, February 23, 2018 16:51:01 Biocyberman via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> So far so much better :)
>
> I really appreciate all answers given so far. Sorry I haven't found a way to reply to everyone.
>
> Many seems to be using the forum's web interface as a second - tier of interaction. I still don't know what can justify this practice.

The NNTP and mailing list interfaces predate the web interface by quite a bit. The web interface was added primarily as a means of making it easier for more casual folks to comment. Those who wish to use it as their primary interface to the newsgroup are free to do so, but anyone looking for the feature set of the web interface to change needs to understand that the web interface is just one interface to an NNTP server and not your typical forum software.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
> From my experience with forum platforms like vBulletin, phpBB, Invision Power, and even interfaces of Google group, and Github Issues, I still find it very difficult to understand the logics of using dlang's forum.

You make it sound like "I even learned clay tablets" :)

> 1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post anymore.

Stackoverflow has this feature, and it's pretty popular on forums too, because when someone abuses editing, people complain that discussions make no sense anymore.

> 2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
>  >First post quoted
>  >>Second post quoted
>  >>>Third post quoted
>  >>Second post quoted

Stackoverflow and github have this feature. Though normally web interface hides the angle quotes, so they shouldn't interfere with reading.

> 3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support.
>  Some tools to emphasize important points will make it easier to let the readers know what the posters want to say.

Bold and italic is a wrong way to format text because it's visual formatting that lacks semantic. You can use markdown to add *emphasis*, it's pretty intuitive, stackoverflow and github have it too. Emphasis only expresses emotions, which can actually distract from content, you better spend time expressing ideas.

> 4.  No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to post more than 5 lines of code.

run.dlang.org

> 5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be helpful to communicate problems.

abload.de

> 6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for threads so we can locate related threads easily.

Usually nobody bothers to fill them, so they won't give you any result.

> If I may say it honestly, and despite the useful 'save unsent draft' feature, the forum is by far the most user-unfriendly forum platform ever (by appearance).

If I were to order them by user-friendliness (in descending order):
dfeed > forums >>> github > stackoverflow > skype

We may need a survey to have a good overview about users opinions.

Speaking on behalf of myself, after additional inputs from many excellent and respectful users in this 'forum'. I can say that, on the scale of 1 (least geeky) to 10 (most geeky), I would put forum.dlang.org to the level 8 of geekiness required to use the forum. It may be natural for long-time users, but for newcomers, it is very challenging.

Mentioning 'challening', here is an excerpt from a fictional interview with the inventor of C++:

=====
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?

Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.

Interviewer: You're kidding...?
(https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm)
=====
I hope it is not offensive to bring up C++'s problems and relate them to D, but the point I am trying to make is *accessibility*. Provided that dlang community is not a the point of saturation, and still needs to grow, things need to be: Accessible (less geeky, less restrictions); Easy to learn and implement; Safe and Fast to program and to run. That would make a good acronym: SAFE safe-accessible-fast-easy, all go in parallel :)


Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, February 23, 2018 16:51:01 Biocyberman via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> So far so much better :)
>>
>> I really appreciate all answers given so far. Sorry I haven't found a
>> way to reply to everyone.
>>
>> Many seems to be using the forum's web interface as a second - tier of
>> interaction. I still don't know what can justify this practice.
> 
> The NNTP and mailing list interfaces predate the web interface by quite a
> bit. The web interface was added primarily as a means of making it easier
> for more casual folks to comment. Those who wish to use it as their primary
> interface to the newsgroup are free to do so, but anyone looking for the
> feature set of the web interface to change needs to understand that the web
> interface is just one interface to an NNTP server and not your typical forum
> software.
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis
> 

Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
>> From my experience with forum platforms like vBulletin, phpBB, Invision Power, and even interfaces of Google group, and Github Issues, I still find it very difficult to understand the logics of using dlang's forum.
> 
> You make it sound like "I even learned clay tablets" :)
Sorry that it kicked in that way. I didn't mean I know all from modern to ancient if that is what you mean with 'learning clay tablets'. But I did mean that even with quite some experience, I still find it challenging to use the forum. I gave example of an typical forum interface to a less typical one. dlang's forum is not anywhere on this scale, in my opinion.

> 
>> 1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post anymore.
> 
> Stackoverflow has this feature, and it's pretty popular on forums too, because when someone abuses editing, people complain that discussions make no sense anymore.
> 
I mean to edit a post right after posting. stackoverflow and many other forums have 5 minutes or more before they lock editing. Only comments on stackoverflow are locked by the way.

>> 2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
>>  >First post quoted
>>  >>Second post quoted
>>  >>>Third post quoted
>>  >>Second post quoted
> 
> Stackoverflow and github have this feature. Though normally web interface hides the angle quotes, so they shouldn't interfere with reading.
> 
I mean, the angle quotes are the problem.

>> 3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support.
>>  Some tools to emphasize important points will make it easier to let the readers know what the posters want to say.
> 
> Bold and italic is a wrong way to format text because it's visual formatting that lacks semantic. You can use markdown to add *emphasis*, it's pretty intuitive, stackoverflow and github have it too. Emphasis only expresses emotions, which can actually distract from content, you better spend time expressing ideas.
> 
I appreciate your preference on this. And I agree with out if it is some sort of formal writing. In short and informal one, it is a way to give visual cues.

>> 4.  No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to post more than 5 lines of code.
> 
> run.dlang.org
> 
I will use this from now on.

>> 5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be helpful to communicate problems.
> 
> abload.de
I am aware of third party sites to upload image, but I meant a built-in and in-place image display.
> 
>> 6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for threads so we can locate related threads easily.
> 
> Usually nobody bothers to fill them, so they won't give you any result.
> 
I do fill them for every question post on stackoverflow. And I find them very helpful.

>> If I may say it honestly, and despite the useful 'save unsent draft' feature, the forum is by far the most user-unfriendly forum platform ever (by appearance).
> 
> If I were to order them by user-friendliness (in descending order):
> dfeed > forums >>> github > stackoverflow > skype
I think it has much to do with setting expectation right. Haven't used dfeed, I had trouble understanding dlang's forum but much less trouble with others.