Nearly 100,000 pageviews served, and a rollicking first day for Keebtalk

I’ll take a look into IFTTT as a solution. I guess the challenge would be that it probably wouldn’t be very granular.

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I have to say @norbauer I continue to be pleasantly surprised by KT, it’s use of discourse and the direction that the forum is trending in. Like others I’m finding my post count steadily increasing - much more so than in other forums including Geekhack.

In terms of the moneistisation , I can see how using vendors to fund hosting can be a good thing, but I still feel that the community should keep the lights on as a whole. The use of a patreon or similar system could provide the necessary income without reliance on vendors - which could be a relationship misinterpreted as enabling some bias and conflict of interests, like people are worried about with I:C involvement here and Massdrop at GH.

That being said I’m excited to continue using the platform and see how it grows :slight_smile:

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IMO the only thing discourse is really missing is some actual threading in the replies. You can reply to a specific post, which is already an improvement over geekhack, but it still just shows it mixed in with everything else chronologically. Totally chronological conversations work fairly well if everyone stays fairly focused on the topic, but that doesn’t seem to actually happen most of the time.

For example, almost all of my experience with geekhack consists of clicking links to specific comments from outside geekhack. When you do that, it drops you into the middle of a conversation, often one that is 5+ pages long. There is no highlighting of the message that is “selected”, so visually it doesn’t stand out at all. I think it tries to center the comment in your window, but if you are near the top or bottom of a page that doesn’t really work. Once you figure out what the comment is you basically have to just scroll back reading every comment until you find the actual context. I’ve looked at some really active threads where you sometimes have to read multiple pages to get through a string of messages where you only actually cared about a few of them.

Here at least if things are quoted you can jump straight to the quoted post, but for really branchy discussions I would rather have a true thread view.

I looked around a bit to see if there were any plugins for threaded replies, but all I really found was this post by the lead dev who either doesn’t seem to understand how branching discussions actually work in practice, or has only used forums that like… actually stay on topic.

I considered digging into the source to see how bad it would be to add it in somewhere, until I saw it was ruby :-1:

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Did you know that if you click the little “X replies” button underneath the post, it will show you the replies to that post? Is that not threading?

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Sort of? You can only really see child posts, when what is more convenient would actually be the opposite. Often I end up in some random point in a thread and just want to see the thread of parent comments that go back to the root of the thread. Think something like adding ?context=1000 to the end of a reddit comment link. This actually neatly collapses a thread into a single linear string of comments.

If you want an actual example of what I’m talking about, compare this tree-from-parent view to this tree-from-child view.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Create a large-font theme for mobile

Thanks @norbauer for this! Hopefully this will calm some nerves about KT. So far I very much prefer KT’s format to GH. The mobile interface is so much better

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As someone relatively new to the enthusiast community, I’m stoked about KT. While my status as a keeb noob may not afford me much credibility, so far I really like Discourse, which has a much better UX than other outdated platforms that, to me, feel much less inviting.

Thanks for offering your insights; this is really great to hear! Don’t be ashamed of being a noob. Our goal is as much to bring new people into the community and hobby as it is to lure over the old guard. In any case, it’s not a zero-sum game. The more keyboard enthusiasts who find a comfy home online where they can flourish, the better all the communities are and the more cool stuff happens from which we all benefit. In short: welcome! :slight_smile:

Great numbers for a first few days. The mentioned server move (from another thread) really smoothed things out. Viewing a page in discourse fires of a background request every 30 seconds or less. Expensive, but worth the real-time features the platform offers.

Now all I’m hoping for is that more GBs open up here, as well as classifieds.

Really can’t express how happy I am about the mobile accessibility of this site.

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Congratulations!!! What a great start. I appreciate the non-profit structure and commitment to being board-driven with people active in the community. It looks like discord provides a much better structure than reddit or GH. Glad to be here.

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I’m really liking what you have done with keebtalk, Norbauer! It seems like things are off to a really good start, the layout is refreshing and clean, honestly it strikes me as a really good intermediary option between geekhack and reddit!

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This sounds really impressive until you realize that I was like 2000 of those just hitting refresh to see what was new.

Haha. An enthusiasm that is greatly appreciated! However, I will say that a site like Discourse actually will tend to show considerably lower pageviews for the same or more activity compared to a site like GeekHack because it loads so much info via XMLHttpRequest rather than actually reloading the page (i.e., no pagination).

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Really good example of “Everything bad is good for something”. I’ve had a feeling that GeekHack backend is being really outdated and realizing there isn’t much of a way out, KT is probably the best thing that could happen to GH (IMO).

And about Discourse, it was getting really popular lately as a software and I gotta say that it’s the best you can get out there (great choice @norbauer!). Still, it’s not a traditional forum and it offers more of a chatty experience on a given topic rather than this structured approach we’re probably used to. It can even be chaotic at times (especially if you have newest posts as your landing page), but it indeed gives much better user experience overall. It’s all up to the moderators and users to keep it being nice, clean and usable.

Thanks a lot for making KT. This was the missing piece between GH and Reddit.

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Progress most often emerges from chaos.

Thank you for saying all that. :slight_smile: I completely agree, especially with your last point about KT being a needed midway sort of place between GH and Reddit (which also means it’s not necessarily a wholesale replacement, nor is it intended to be).

I’ve felt similarly about GeekHack for years, but if it weren’t for the chaotic sale, I probably never would have had the impetus to start something like Keebtalk on my own. So I think in the end I think everything that happened at GH will have ended up being for the best.

Perhaps I’m being grumpy but I don’t understand all the butt hurt about the site name, infinite scroll, how Ruby isn’t the fad of the week, or whatever.

A community is formed from relationships - not software.

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This is actually what I have been saying a lot as well. Discourse doesn’t have full threading like reddit, but it at least has half an attempt at threading which is more than can be said for phpbb or whatever it is GH runs on. It has something vaguely resembling a voting system, but not pushed so hard that voting is the most important thing in determining what threads people see. The reddit system of time and votes determining where it sits on the “front page” which is all that most people will ever see doesn’t really work very well for some aspects of the mechanical keyboard community. It certainly works well for things like pictures and memes, but it doesn’t work very well for long-running threads like ICs and GBs and meetup threads.

IMO what @Albru said about KT sort of occupying a middle ground between GH and Reddit was pretty close, but I think most people either liked GH or liked reddit, and not many people really liked both (though many would tolerate the one that they liked less haha). KT sits in just the right part of the middle area where it pulls in most of the things I like about reddit, and most of the things that made me want to like geekhack, without any of the things that bothered me about geekhack.

I don’t know how it looks for someone coming from the other direction, but I imagine it would be a lot of the same, with KT pulling most of the things they liked about GH, without the parts of reddit that bothered them.

I really hope the community over here keeps growing, even if I do think reddit is still probably better suited for pictures.

Despite having using reddit on/off for years, I still don’t really understand how it works. It feels like a one off topic, for example, showing off a photo of something you owned, and then the topic get buried. And whatever conversation that was started is hard to follow and continue. It’s just a real mess and I am unable to appreciate reddit and do not understand its popularity.

Discourse and any other sane forum software, I get that!