Initial Impressions on the forum

Participation Systems
#1

I’m very familiar with Discourse as forum software, and just signed up for this forum today. I’d like to give some feedback based on my first few minutes of this Discourse instance.

  1. There is no immediately obvious way to create an account.
    • The UI shows a Log In button only, without hinting that it can be used to create a new account.
    • I used the “email” method, and put in an email address which I’ve used for my bugzilla.mozilla.org account, hoping it might share accounts with this.
    • Spoiler: apparently not. I got an email (which went to my spam folder) to confirm my address. It also claimed the URL was only good for five minutes. Good thing I don’t graylist![*]
    • After that I was presented with a dialog to create an account here.
  2. There seems to be something odd with Discobot here. It took me three tries to get rid of the “You’ve got a new alert” overlay. I’ve never seen that happen before.
  3. Why are user icons square in the top bar and round on posts? Discourse standard is round everywhere. (This is not terribly important, but while I’m posting anyway.)

*: also that mail is From: Mozilla SSO <noreply@sso.mozilla.com> but then says “If you are having any issues with your account, please don’t hesitate to contact us by replying to this mail.” Is it a noreply email address or not?

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#2

Thanks for all this feedback!

We used to show a “Log In / Sign Up” combined button, but that got lost with various theme updates. I’ll be adding it back in the next couple of weeks.

As you found out, this doesn’t happen, but may be coming in the future - although it may involve bugzilla moving to a shared “Mozilla account” with Discourse and other Mozilla web properties. It may also involve something else. There’s not really anything I can point at in this area, but usability improvements are definitely planned for the future.

Cheers, noted. I’m chasing it up with the team responsible for sending those emails.

I’m having trouble activating the overlay! I’ve signed up with a few new accounts, and it’s not popping up. You got any tricks to getting it to activate?

Mozilla’s standard is square user icons :wink:

And I haven’t yet made the remaining round ones square to make sure I didn’t break anything. They’ll be coming, the theme is an iterative process.

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#3

On other sites, it has been a very reliable first login thing. Can’t say I have a trick to share.