I’m warming up to the forum, but… I wonder how other people feel about the pop-ups that appear over the preview panel when writing a message.
Currently, I have to clear two pop-ups – one for related posts (which might be helpful), and another about community guidelines. Now… OK, sure, people can be rude online, and it’s good to have something to remind them to be civil. But that particular pop-up said it would appear for the first six posts, and I’m pretty sure I’m past that point, and it’s still appearing.
Maybe not a big deal and maybe not configurable, but I do feel it’s legitimate to express an opinion. Pop-overs in web design are way, way out of control – “here’s the thing you want to see… no, now here’s something we want you to see, which you have to click on to get out of the way… oh but wait, there’s something else we want you to see, covering the place where you have to click to clear the other one…” Come on. Let us just use the thing
The “Related Posts” pop-over only shows up if the forum finds other topics with similar titles as the one you just typed. You can dismiss it with the “Esc” key. I think this is useful functionality, and it feels appropriate that you have to actively dismiss it. If the pop-over avoids even a small number of duplicated topics, this is still a large and worthwhile impact when measured over years and thousands of topics. Hitting esc / clicking through is a small amount of effort for users, but it’s a much larger amount of work for moderators to merge / clean-up duplicate topics long after the fact.
Having said all that… if it seems like the “related topics” search isn’t really ever giving useful results to anyone, then it seems reasonable to consider not showing it.
The community guidelines are shown for the first 6 posts - you should not be seeing them anymore (if you are, it’s a bug). It’s not only meant for people who may be inclined to be jerks - it’s as much or even MORE to assure new users that this is a community with guidelines and norms, where they will be treated with respect and don’t have to worry about harassment or antagonistic behavior. In general, online forums can be pretty awful places and MANY people simply don’t bother with them at all because of this - even though WE might trust our community, there’s simply no reason why a random person stumbling on to this forum should assume it’s any different from the dumpiest of subreddits. Hopefully being up-front about community standards means some people will be a little more inclined to post, answer a question, or engage.
I think my issue is not that these features are not at all useful – “related posts” is a nice idea, and I think more sites should be more upfront about community standards. I think my concerns are:
Not configurable. Maybe the user would like the pop-overs in a different place, or advanced users might not need them at all.
Not working as expected. I’m 100% sure that I got the community-standards pop-up more than six times. If it says it’ll pop up six times, then it should really be six times, not 8 or 10.
Anyway, I’m up to post 12 or 13 now, and the guidelines pop-up didn’t appear this time… so I guess, back to regularly scheduled programming.
And feel free to ignore me… this is a general peeve of mine, not only this site… just had a bit of an “et tu, Brute?” feeling here. Taken with a sense of humor.
