Can I get to an unthreaded view by date? I am in the group of people that turn off threaded views in email programs. I like to see latest posts first regardless of topic and move back in forth by days/weeks/months etc. Thank You!
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Jeff Atwood, the guy that founded and wrote Discourse, strongly believes online discussions should be flat. This makes it easy to read the whole conversation in chronological order, without clicking through each message.
There is no option to enable any other view.
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Do you mean Discord? IMHO Discord is far inferior to the old TMF boards. It has so little organization that it’s just painful. I quit using Discord after giving it a month or so of trying to understand it.
Unfortunately, these new boards have similar organization problems.
—Peter
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“Jeff Atwood, the guy that founded and wrote Discourse, strongly believes online discussions should be flat. This makes it easy to read the whole conversation in chronological order, without clicking through each message.”
OK, well he’s an idiot. I want to read what I want to read, when I want to read it. I don’t want to read every entire thread. I want to read posters who I know have something to say, not “everyone on the internet” Where do I find the list of posts by mungofitch? Or albaby1? Or syke6? Where do I find a new thread with an interesting title? Where do I find the list of recommended posts so I can jump into the middle of a thread for one post if I so choose?
I’m hoping there’s a way, otherwise this is just discordinance, without the intelligence.
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100% agree. Right now all I want is to find a post by MungoFitch to see if any minor or major bottom detectors have kicked in. I can’t even tell if mungo has even made a new post on these boards. It’s awful, there are about 20 posters I read religiously and all I want is to find all their posts so I can skim through. I don’t have time to read everyone’s thoughts in this cacophony format.
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No, Discourse is different from Discord.
Where do I find the list of posts by mungofitch? Or albaby1?
Each user has a profile page, with their recent activity, just like before. Nothing really changed. There are many routes to get to a profile activity page.
- If you follow the user, go to Community / More… / Users then click on their name.
- Click on any name in a post
- Use the Search to locate any users profile
Even better, you can use the Advanced Search to locate posts by a specific user containing a word or phrase.
Where do I find a new thread with an interesting title?
You can find new discussions under Community / Everything / New
Where do I find the list of recommended posts so I can jump into the middle of a thread for one post if I so choose?
You can find top discussions under Community / Everything / Top. It’s not exactly what you are looking for, but close.
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If you click My Posts in the left sidebar:
And then click Follows:
You should see a list of recent posts by all of your favorite Fools from the old system, which were migrated. This is actually a feature that was added by Discourse based on our request.
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It’s awful, there are about 20 posters I read religiously and all I want is to find all their posts so I can skim through. I don’t have time to read everyone’s thoughts in this cacophony format.
What if I don’t want to read every post that Mugofitch writes on every topic. What if I just want to see what he posted on a specific board. Easy on the old boards, just open the board and skim down the posts—handily & concisely presented as one line per post–and read the posts of only those people I want to.
I guess TMF had reasons to replace the old boards. But I predict that the whole thing will die a medium-slow death.
I suspect that MapG nailed it when he posted on the old boards:
Subject: OT: I don’t think I’ll be back
Date: 9/18/2022 9:14 AM
After a very long journey with MF and familiar names, I will probably not be participating in the new community.
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Agree, although I’m not sure it will be a slow death. I don’t feel any community with this new format, it just seems like a shotgun of posts and I have no idea where to focus. Maybe it’s wonderful for some people, and if so I’m content being the dinosaur going extinct, but I’d trade color, highlighting and embedded videos for a clean easy to navigate set of postings any day. I just want focused and quality content I can consume quickly. Where will people go if not here is my question, any consensus on other options?
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Easy enough to scan through his recent activity here –
There are lots of ways to access posts. You just need to find the one that works best for you.
Vicki
Search can show you all of mungofitch’s posts on a specific board.
Compare that to the old boards where he might have only 1-2 posts per page.
Then what is Discourse?
–Peter
This is the software being used.
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The Motley Fool community discussion system is based on discourse. It calls itself modern forum software for your community.
From my perspective discord is a cooperative-gaming communication platform with the ability to have an audio channel and a place for discussion and pictures to be dropped. It is more for interactive use with a smallish group.
Vicki
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Thank you. Now I understand. So, backing up a bit:
Then he sounds like another of those idiot savants in the mold of a few other noteworthy folks - who are brilliant in their chosen field, but cannot understand why anyone would think in a way different from their own way of thinking, or possibly even comprehend that there is another perfectly valid way of thinking.
There are multiple ways of approaching something like a conversation. I have no problem with a flat approach. But there are advantages to the individual post approach that we had at the old boards. Neither way is fully correct or fully wrong. Both have their uses.
We had that on the old boards. Just view the whole thread. I did that fairly often. But I also liked to skim through individual popular posts on highly active boards. If the post was interesting, I could easily switch to a threaded view, seeing the whole conversation in chronological order.
Yes, individual conversations are fairly easy to read here. But FINDING those conversations is much harder.
Personally, I would have preferred TMF to switch to phpBB, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. That software follows the same general format as here (Discourse) - individual conversations grouped by fairly focused subject, with those subjects able to be combined into a higher level, broader topic. So stocks organized by individual company; personal finance broken down into things like retirement, taxation, living below your means; investing approaches broken down into each individual approach. Yes, it is also strictly flat, but the hierarchy is much more obvious and easier to navigate. I find it far more intuitive than this mess here.
Having said that, I am going to stick around and try to get comfortable. But I slipped into phpBB forums (of which I participate in several) almost trivially from the old TMF boards. This is a much harder transition.
–Peter
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Peter, I agree that transitioning to phpBB would have been much smoother for the existing users. That said, TMF wants to attract younger members. Millennials use Instagram, Tictock, FB, etc. They would think phpBB is a relic from the 20th century, and they would be correct.
I suppose TMF weighed the needs of the existing users against the need to bring in new, younger members. We will see ina couple years if they made the right choice.
[old cynic mode on]
Well, they may be right. Assuming the main purpose of these boards is to generate revenue rather than providing a free public service, getting younger folks in the doors is important. A main reason for that is TMF’s early success in educating their users. The old users learned that they didn’t need highly paid advisors to invest successfully. They learned they could invest for themselves using a low cost broker (that used to be important back in the ancient years of the 20-aughts). Or they learned that they could invest in a couple of low cost index funds and be ahead of most managed accounts on an after-fee basis.
So the old fogies who have been with TMF for 15 or 20 or more years simply weren’t buying the new TMF services at a fast enough clip. So out with the old and in with the new. Out with the old boards, in with the new ones. Out with the old posters - who have the nasty habit of not buying stuff and, worse yet, showing younger folks how to invest for themselves - and in with the new folks who haven’t learned about investing yet and are willing to part with their money to subscribe to various newsletters and investment schemes.
So yes, TMF may be doing exactly the right thing here.
–Peter
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One of the things we needed from the new board system was a layer of security that we didn’t have in the old system. I suspect that phpBB would not have helped with that.
At any rate, here we are. So, we will keep learning together.
There is a much, much better search tool now.
Vicki
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Considering that there was literally none before, that’s pretty faint praise. And using Google’s site: search actually worked pretty well.
The other issue I have with the new search tool is that it can’t search posts from before 2022. Because those posts weren’t migrated. With apparent exceptions. In searching for any posts of my own from before 2022, I did see that those from Saul’s Board were transitioned. But no others.
–Peter
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