I’m referring to the “This is the first time …” notification.
And just for the record, I’m not faulting @jaanus.luus in any way for this! Discourse caused this, Jaanus had no control over this, nor any idea this might happen.
I haven’t gone over to the Discourse forum to look for it, but I suspect this is another UI “improvement” that Discourse pushed because our forum is hosted and managed by them - without any notice to us, the lowly users!!
I’d be less upset if this didn’t take up valuable screen space which, when there are a few replies I haven’t yet read, causes me to have to take more time scrolling.
I’ve seen, but paid less attention to similar messages about “It’s been a long since …” and there might be other variations.
While there is a social aspect to this forum, it’s primary purpose is to ask for and receive help, and to exchange information. The social aspect is incidental (and, especially for the Corner Bar category and the “Welcome to our forum” thread - much appreciated by me!) I just want the purely social aspects to not intrude on the rest of my forum scanning experience.
My thoughts: the messages seem to have some ‘intelligence’ based on some data about the user, but neglects data of the reader.
Give the reader the chance to turn it of, I would say, or, based on the number of read posts (plus who posted them) filter information that the reader probably allready knows…
For instance, you just read the welcome post and saw @newuser post something, you should not get that message of ‘this is his first post, etc’
Aiaiai…
Also, the “suggestion” in this worthless notice could lead to a bunch of “noise” in the topic if readers actually follow the “advice” and yank the discussion off-topic with frivolous “welcoming”.
They did not come to be “welcomed” they came to get answers.
What a waste of time and effort when there are other features users have asked for.
Note that they HAVE implemented a special “Feature > Announcements” category that you can subscribe to (called “Watched” or “Tracked” categories in your user “Preferences > Notifications > Categories.”)
@sam, Can this category be “mirrored” to as a subcategory of our "Meta category ?
Or is there a way to have the annoucements sent as an email digest ?
I agree with the sentiments here. I also noticed that one of the notices must have been wrong because the OP wrote that he hadn’t posted for some time - so he wasn’t new technically.
You’d be right, but I think they are pretty proud of this, and refer to it as a great feature, though they don’t necessarily intend to dictate how it gets implemented.
I first saw this on the Rhino Forum, and came over here to get away from it. And wouldn’t you know it’s over here too. So if you think it’s bad seeing it just once, try heading on over to the Rhino Forum and getting a second taste of it over there.
Sam has been responding to those criticisms and he recommends that folks give it a chance. The extra context that a forum community can derive in viewing these messages will go to help ensure that everyone is kind to each new user, and a positive experience will follow accordingly.
Research from 2016 showed that the first reply to someone has a disproportionate effect on their overall experience.
They say this can all be turned off… and I guess we’ll see if that actually happens on this forum.
If we are going to keep it, then I think we should really embrace the spirit of the message and give it a proper forum badge. Something like a Gold Star for demonstrating kindness to new users, the sort that often gets handed out to children attending kindergarten, or the first grade.
I’m sure a working professional who’s paid to license SketchUp, and volunteers their spare time to answer questions on this forum, won’t mind receiving a Gold Star Badge anymore then they mind the simpering reminders about being kind to new users.
@mods
How To - Disabling Callouts:
• setting the returning users days site setting to 0 will stop generating future notices at least for returning users
• adding the following to the theme CSS:
For once I’m thinking this new feature might be useful, but it remains to be seen if I get annoyed by it too. I haven’t been that active the last few days and have just seen it once or twice. In general I think developers/designers should be very careful with adding anything that could be just extra noise to users.
The banner should probably be made to disappear somewhen (after first or several replies) when the new user has already been welcomed. I looks a bit “retardé”.
The “This is the first time …” banner from the screen shot I included in the opening post on this thread is now gone when I look at that topic again. And @jaanus.luus has, indeed, posted since then.
Meaning that if we can sit back and wait long enough till there won’t be any of these banners left?
Meaning that I can take off my “blue banner filtering away” glasses. They really helped.
They really helped.