I signed up for this forum and visited on my phone.
First screen I see is here. I cannot figure out where to click because your message telling me to click is in the way, taking up the whole screen. I see a list behind your pop-up, but I can’t get to it. That looks like bad design, or bad mobile view. Very frustrating and confusing.
I understand now on careful examination that it’s referring to the icon on the upper right. That’s not obvious. Your pop-up should highlight the icon in some way.
On closer inspection I see you DO highlight the icon, but your highlight is hidden behind the page header. Your Z order is wrong.
Next, I tried to create this post. I clicked on category. I see a bunch of tiny light gray text at the top of the page. It goes off the top of the page, so the top sentence is sliced in half horizontally. That looks like a bug, or another rendering problem.
Next I clicked the category field to pick a category for this post. But I cannot see your full list of categories because my keyboard is in the way. If I tap my close-keyboard button on the phone, then you navigate me back, away from tthe page. Very frustrating user experience.
Next, I opened my profile menu. I clicked dismiss. Now I want to close the profile menu. On my medium screen there’s not enough room on the left to tap the page. I wouldn’t want to close the menu by tapping the page as a way to close the menu, because that might activate whatever I tapped. I want a close menu button. It could be an X, or could be the same icon I tapped to open the menu-- either would intuitively make sense. I intuitively tapped my phone back button, which is a standard way to close a menu. Instead of closing the menu, it navigates the whole page backwards.
Hey and welcome to our forum. Sorry to hear you have such a bad experience, but this forum is a service provided by Discourse and there is nothing we as Kirby can do about this (apart from changing forums).
Since I never use this forum on mobile, I cannot tell if this is something specific regarding your device or a general problem.
Well, that’s not what I said, is just nothing I can help with at the moment, I’m afraid. Maybe you can provide some more information on the device you are using?
To be honest you are the first to report these issues. I use the forum regularly on my iPhone SE (2016), which is even tinier. Especially the category selection and the notification sidebar are indeed a bit fiddly (even more so on my device), but they do work. The lists can still be scrolled above the keyboard and the sidebar can be closed by tapping outside on the left.
I understand that the UX design of Discourse doesn’t work for everyone. It is a bit idiosyncratic in some places like the ones you mentioned.
If you don’t like working with it on your phone, maybe it’s easier to use the forum on a larger screen (PC or tablet).
We are of course responsible for our own forum, but we can’t change specific interface elements as it’s not our own code. So as Sonja mentioned, please report your feedback to the Discourse developers who can actually do something about these issues.
I guess you and i have different standards for what’s acceptable in software. i am thinking about the forum i want to provide my own users. i can’t ask them to use a larger screen.
i don’t think she suggested that, but that’s a good idea.
I have a suggestion, for Kirby team to investigate Discourse themes. Maybe you can make one for getkirby. There are several available, and you can make your own. So, if you have any CSS people on your team, maybe someone could address the idiosyncrasies i reported here.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to change a theme on the fly without knowing what side effects this might have on other users. We are using the hosted service, not a self-hosted variant that we can test thoroughly, so any changes would take effect immediately. As @lukasbestle already mentioned, you are the first user to report this problem on mobile.
Ok, i understand that it’s easier for Kirby to use a hosted forum.
But i wouldn’t assume that users are just fine. In my experience as a professional developer, most users just slog through problematic, fiddly, and idiosyncratic software without reporting issues, with the expectation that developers don’t like to hear about issues. Those users might be correct.
Thx for fixing the bullets. i will report to Discourse. i didn’t suggest you switch your forum system, just tweak it a little. But i understand if that’s not possible. I’ll slog through
Please understand my comments here are not just about my own personal experience, but about the forum that i want to offer my users with my future Kirby site.
Guess if you were a true professional developer, you should tell the difference between Discourse and Kirby, i.e. between a forum and a CMS. Probably you just had a bad day. Try a couple of beers.
For what its worth, I don’t have a problem at all using the mobile forum ( 6 year old Google Nexus 6P ). In the defence of Discourse, there are a million phones out there are testing them and pleasing everybody is very difficult. The best approach is still to report the issues to Discourse directly though, i’m sure they will be glad of the feedback.
This was partially the fault of my old eyes. Their choice of colors for their highlight over the notification is hard for me to see. Maybe they could highlight better. Or make the background blacker.
Just to clarify. You don’t have to use Discourse at all if you want to provide a forum for your own users. We have absolutely no relationship between Kirby and Discourse and there’s no requirement to use Discourse as a forum software when you build a Kirby site.
Thank you to Bastian for your professionalism and graciousness. I understand there’s no relationship between Kirby and Discourse. I posted my feedback to Discourse and will follow up with them.
i’d share a link, but this forum won’t allow me to link to discourse.org
