Topic Creator’s avatar in “latest” view on home

Site Feedback
#1

I’d prefer seeing the Topic Creator’s avatar in “latest” view on home, rather than that of the latest poster’s avatar. (This suggestion pertains to both discussion.fedoraproject.org and ask.fedoraproject.org.)

It seems more natural to me.

When I see a post displayed like:

image

it makes me think the FPL posted the question.

The following post at meta.discourse.org describes similar reasoning and links to a possible modification to change the avatar to Topic Creator:

Thanks for considering,

Robin

4 Likes
#2

I think it’s a decent ideal. @hhlp, looks like something we can do in the theme?

1 Like
#3

Yep, definitively a good idea… @mattdm

The typical behavior is to take the avatar of the latest response.

Although we’re into the field of Web Development, a explain a bit, taken from there:

If you override a template (the topic-list-item for example) and subsequent changes are made to that template in Discourse core, you need to make sure you update your template to make sure everything works as expected. Think of it like maintaining a fork on Github.

What do I suggest?

  1. +1 for Change this.
  2. Design TEAM has Task Force for a New Desing TEAM for both :fedora: sites, I suggest including this change there.
  3. If there is something, which we can’t live without it, I can check out, but I prefer option 2.
  4. If we make a fork of the actual Theme we don’t receive any updates and we need to report to Desing TEAM too → double work.

Thoughts?

References

Regards.,

1 Like
#4

Some forum systems (not Discourse) do both — topic creator’s avatar on the left, next to the post title and creation date (left-justified, assuming a LTR locale), then the latest poster’s avatar at the right edge, with the timestamp for their post underneath.

That’s kind of ideal, in my experience. It associates every data element with the ones it’s most relevant to, and clearly separates not-directly-related items (like the title and the last posting time).

1 Like
#5

If you look at the “latest” view, that shows up to five icons — the most recent 5, I assume.

1 Like
#6

I’ve seen this on other Discourse forums, but I’m not sure if it was done with a custom theme or in some other way.

My preference is for each recent post to show who was the most recent poster in the thread. This is how most forums I’ve used for the last 10 years work, and it would throw me off a bit if every new reply only showed the original topic creator. This might be less noticeable if you only look at the home page time to time, but it is more noticeable when you are an active participant in a thread and you already know context behind how the conversation started.

#7

Yes, thanks, I’ll probably just skip over to the latest view, where the UX makes more sense to me. In fact, many discourse sites use the latest view for their home view. Example: https://clojureverse.org/

Robin

#8

I think that makes sense for an instance focused on a more specific topic. With the Fedora Project, there are so many diverse areas that having categories be prominent at first makes most sense to me. Once you’re familiar with the site and can customize your preferences to your liking, a different view might make sense (and it’s nicely customizable on a per-user basis).

1 Like
#9

Ah, I didn’t notice we can specify preferred view in Preferences > Interface > Default Home Page.

I got it the way I like now:

image

Thanks!

1 Like
#10

Yep! Generic link here for everyone’s convenience: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/my/preferences/interface