Discourse - show me more!

Community General Discussion
1

Hi folks - I’m getting familiar with the new Discourse forums, but have questions I can’t seem to find answers for. Questions:

  1. Is there some way to get a lot less white space and a lot more discussion topics? e.g. I’d like to see perhaps 20-50 topics that are active. As it sits, I’m lucky to get maybe 10, and way too much scrolling and clicking categories.
  2. Same thing when reading a topic, it will list the latest updates and new, but will only give about 7, when there may be dozens and dozens, and I’d like to browse more.
  3. Your topic is similar to… gives me complete garbage suggestions. Is there some way to fix this? eg not even close suggestions are coming up.
    Thanks in advance,
    Colin
2

@aru Do you know of any way Colin might achieve this?

3

Hi Colin,

It’s not possible to adjust whitespace on a per-user level. You can view your interface settings here: https://forums.aavso.org/u/chaig1/preferences/interface. Changing the text to be smaller could more content to fit on the page.

Alternatively, pressing the spacebar scrolls the page by viewport height, which might be easier than manually scrolling.

Since our forums are still new, you may not always find suggested topics that match your query.

Thanks,
Aru

4

Thank Aru - good to know.
I tried making the text size smaller - it just gives smaller text, and doesn’t give me more info.

1 Like
5

One more (stupid) question: Is there a way to hide topics that I’ve read? For example, in the “New & Unread Topics” or in a section like Technology - if I’ve read everything, is there a way to show only unread stuff? like unread replies or unread topics? I spent about 30mins trying to figure this out, and am feeling pretty dumb…

6

I also wish there was more information on a page and less white space. I don’t have any idea which files that I have not read. I visit almost every day and look at the Topics item that shows me how many are new, but don’t know what I may have missed from a month ago. In Technology, for instance, the last column to the right gives me a hint as to how old the post is. That is useful only because I visit often. Your thought on hiding stuff I have read already made me think that I sometimes want to see an old post. There is a search button on top and I discovered that if I am in Technology It gives options to search only Technology or search everything. The old forums did not always show me the correct balloon as to what was unread, hit or miss.

Ray