So it’s useful to have commit notifications drop into Discourse; the downside is it absolutely drowns out conversation if you mix it in with everything else.
So I was thinking of changing the front page to look like this:
The upside is this no longer looks like a flood of commit messages with an occasional human interaction, but it also looks like nothing is happening unless you click through to a category you want to read. I’m torn.
As usual, there’s a 100+ comment thread that says “this used to work and you took it away” interspersed with Discourse devs willfully misunderstanding the problem. But fortunately, someone wrote a plugin that lets you mark a category as “don’t show this in the latest topics” which is exactly what I needed.
So disregard all this, we’re up and running without commit spam now.
I do find this way of dealing with end-users frustrating as an end-user, but as a developer (even an SDL developer), I also deprioritize some bug reports and choose to ignore others, so it’s not an entirely alien concept to me. They seem to do this most over small details (can we add a basic setting here? Can we change this string here?), which makes things feel more frustrating because it doesn’t feel like these are big asks, at least from where I’m sitting.
But overall, my complaints with Discourse are pretty small…it’s been rock-solid and useful even when I can’t successfully advocate for my specific use-cases of small details. But in this instance, someone wrote a plugin to fill the gap, so it’s solved anyhow.
I think there’s a difference between deprioritizing (or even ignoring) and willfully misunderstanding.
The former is often necessary, while the latter is not and shows total disrespect (maybe even contempt) for the user.
Yes, and that was my point way back when: the discourse devs have a long and ugly history of “contempt for the user,” particularly when the users dare to offer bug reports or suggest that their product is not perfect.
