About site usability, it would be nice if there’s an option to change the site color scheme, particularly into darker theme. The current color scheme burn my night-adapted eyes.
A list of currently active/logged in users would be nice (like other forum board). That way you’ll know who you’re discussing to.
Since this is a feature that would be useful to more than just Kaza (and could be done neater from the backend, with user settings and all, rather than being persisted only in the window), I’d suggest asking Discourse Meta about it.
If it gets implemented upstream, we’ll get it, and so will the steadily growing number of other forums running Discourse.
There are several problems with these lists (popular on certain phpBB forums), that mean they can never really be accurate, or implemented in a way that holds up to any reasonable standards.
Web applications receive a request from the user, respond to it, and close the connection. Accurately tracking user activity would require continuously sending activity notices to the server saying “this user is still here!”.
This would make the site slightly slower for each user browsing it, since it would have to continuously process these little pings. But more importantly, it’d be a waste of the user’s battery and bandwidth - two far too precious resources to be wasted carelessly.
If we rule out the option of sending dedicated data for presence notifications, there’s still another option: judge based on the data that is already sent - Discourse keeps track of how far into a thread you’ve read, you may post something, etc. This would open up another issue: Accuracy.
The user may still be on the site without generating any footprints, perhaps reading a long post, or pondering their next response. They may even be on a mobile device and lose connection. These would all cause them to appear and disappear off the active users list.
The solution here would be to interpolate, and count anyone who was active in the last x minutes. But this wouldn’t be accurate at all, and by reducing jitter in the list you’re also reducing accuracy even further, all in the name of usability… of a feature that wouldn’t serve any purpose if it wasn’t accurate. It also wouldn’t at all account for those following threads using email notifications (like me).
Also, a feature like this would require some way for people to opt out of being tracked - phpBB does this on the login screen, but it can get away with this because it’s bloody awful at keeping people logged in, whereas Discourse will keep people logged in for all eternity unless they log out themselves.
Aside from being a blatant privacy violation, showing up on an online list with no way to go invisible can put pressure on you to participate in threads you may not have a fully thought out answer to, or simply log out and lurk that way (thus opting out of bookmarks, likes, replies, protected forums, etc). Neither of these are things we want to happen here.
Finally, a forum is an asynchronous medium. It’s not a chatroom. You make a post, other people read it, whenever it’s convenient for them. They may be at work, or be asleep, or perhaps in another timezone. Maybe even all three at once, you never know. They may then choose to reply immediately, take their time carefully wording their response, or not reply at all. Someone may come around months after the fact and have a brilliant contribution to the topic.
As such, I personally feel like an online member list would be not only technically infeasible, but also straight against the spirit of a forum, and potentially detrimental to the community to boot.
*drops mic*
https://usatlife.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/imma-let-you-finish.gif?w=280
I agree that it promotes the wrong idea of what this forum is. We actively push people to resurrect old threads. We link back to old things, and have a pretty amazing search function for looking through all of that stuff. More importantly, most of it is actual content. Having a list of everyone who is online promotes conversation more than it promotes discussion, I think.
Oh, wow. Certainly not expecting that lengthy reply. 
Certainly, you’re right. Just seems strange that a forum didn’t use that. It’s more like wiki-style discussion.
Im just asking, and dont get me wrong since I dont really know how the forum works. But is there a possibility to see how many people read a specific post or by whom it was read?
Well discourse already has a way of tracking which posts you’ve read, although it probably does something along the lines of “if you’ve read the latest post, you’ve read all the posts”
EDIT: Oh no wait, it does seem to track everytime you scroll through and read a post. Hmmm well it sure has the data, I wonder if it’s been implemented in Discourse
As Uppfinnarn already implied, I’m pretty sure the Discourse devs (and us by extension) want to keep that creeper factor to a minimum. Knowing who read your post shouldn’t be important.
Yeah. The data is there, but it’s only shown to you yourself (in the form of the thread immediately jumping to where you were). Nothing good would come out of revealing it to others.
I was thinking; a week or two ago, we talked about D&D /pathfinder on the line chat and some people were interested, so I started thinking about it and came up with an idea. Would anyone be interested in participating in a campaign that takes place in the Angel Beats! world. The players could control their character who would be member of the Shinda Sekai Sensen and fight alongside Yuri and Hinata or it could take place afterward, after everyone we know left and new people enter the school; same setting, different era, so you get the world settings with new characters.
I am very curious about how that would pan out…
Two ideas:
Maybe you could add a Novel Review section in the user profile section.
So we can share our insights, and read others opinions too.
Maybe a rating system too? Like in imdb, with stars. By the way you could create clever stats with that information, so we know the trends.
Also, we could have a “current activity/state” (just like Facebook). Something like: “I’m reading xxx route yyy” and “it feels feel great”. That could be shown in the user profile and in the popup box with the user info.
What do you think?
I personally think this would be out of scope for the forums, and better suited to something like VNDB…
Hello @uppfinnarn! And what about the status, under the nicknames?
…huh?
In other words… in the contextual box that appears on the forum, the box that shows some information from the user (taken from their profile data) we could also add a new field: a “status” field.
We could display that under their nickname, all in order to share what are we doing or thinking (related to Key of course).
Examples are: “I’m reading Kanon for the first time” “Lost in Rewrite!” and so on…
What do you guys think? I believe it could be interesting and fun and maybe easy to implement.
My 2 cents.
HTH,
warmest regards amigos,
P.S.: Example, in your case would be under Emily or maybe above it. Again, just like a “mood/status” in Skype style or Facebook style. I believe that may add value to this great forum.
To be honest, you could do that in your bio.
The problem with implementing it as a field is that the overall UI isn’t designed for it, which means it’d have to be squeezed in somewhere in your settings, where people would forget to update it… and at that point, it wouldn’t be much more than an extra field under the bio.
Like, I totally get what you mean, but I don’t think there’s a good way to do it on a forum, or a very good idea. It’d have to be updated too often for what the UI makes quite comfortable.
Alright, whatever you guys think it is the best. I’ll keep trying to drop some ideas from time to time. Thank you for the forum! I know it requires love and dedication. 
Greetings from Argentina
Just keep in mind that there’s only so much we can do. We’re not developers of the forum software, we’re merely users of Discourse. I’m sure there’s certain modifications we could make if we really wanted, but that’s usually a big ask, and it all takes time and knowledge and manpower we don’t have.
If you have suggestions for changes to be made to the Discourse forum software, you can pose them to the developers at https://meta.discourse.org/.
Yeah, I can make plugins for Discourse no problem if there’s something that really should be one, bust most ideas that have been posted here are things that would be useful not only to us, but to anyone who uses Discourse - thus I’ve referred them to Discourse Meta.
Modifications in the form of plugins aren’t /that/ hard to make, but they come with a maintenance burden, and should thus be made only for something really, really useful that would justify it.
I thought it would be a good idea but no one seems interested so I guess I’ll try to reformulate and re propose later. If it get enough attention making personalized rules would not be too hard and we could use the webside roll 20, a virtual tabletop, to play on line, I’ll try to talk about it with others and see if anyone is interested. With your consent of course, If you find it inappropriate I can just drop the idea.
