tl;dr We will soon have sliding menus and the topic title will be displayed as your scroll.
I’m just about to upgrade Discourse to the latest version - something we do about once a month. With this new version, there are a couple of features that have proved a little controversial to a number of Discourse communities so I thought I’d forewarn you all and give you a workaround for one of those features.
These features only impact mobile users and one of them (I believe) only impacts Android users. Personally, I think both features are improvements but I know that some animals don’t like change.
Sliding menus (only impacts
As you know, Discourse has two main menus - the user menu and the hamburger menu.
You access the user menu by clicking/touching your avatar and the hamburger menu, so-called because it is three horizontal lines that to some people resembles a burger between two buns, is accessed by clicking/touching those three lines in the top right of the display.
It will still be possible to access these menus in the same way after the upgrade but with this upgrade, on Android phones, you will be able to swipe from the right to get access to your user menu and swipe from the right to get access to your hamburger menu.
See this video…
This should be live shortly.
I’m told that this feature is not available on iPhone devices because Apple uses the ‘swipe from margin’ event to go ‘back’. So that’s either your own fault for buying into a closed platform you techno-retarded fucks, or kudos to you for being held prisoner by the ghost of Steve Jobs if you don’t like/want the feature.
Topic title now visible as you scroll on mobile
So what problem is this solving?
Previously as you scrolled a long topic on mobile, and especially if you found yourself moving around lots of different topics, it was easy to forget the title of the topic you were currently scrolling through. Discourse would scroll the posts up the screen and leave the home logo, and your menu options at the top of the screen - the title was not displayed anywhere.
With this modification, as you scroll up the screen so your user avatar and hamburger menu are replaced with the text of the topic title and the category icons.
Why is this controversial?
If your user avatar disappears, so does your instant notification of any messages or new posts. So as you scroll you are now no longer able to see those notifications in real-time.
To mitigate this, and as shown in the video below, you can scroll back up the screen a small way and your user menu avatar will then be re-shown.
It’s fiddly, it’s not particularly instinctive and it hides notifications which is why many in the wider Discourse community have complained about it.
We have the ability to turn this on or off site-wide or we can give you (each user) the chance to turn it on or off yourself. I will post further instructions on how to do that after I’ve done the upgrade.
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