I had no idea that was there. Well, that settles it then. I no longer have a problem with that specific feature.
You learn something new every day…
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I’m not particularly against the “who’s online” feature, but I don’t find it to be that interesting or useful myself. And honestly, I don’t think that a lot of people use or expect something like that these days. It’s not like FB or IG or Reddit or the other channels that folks use these days offer that functionality. Functionally, it also doesn’t scale well at all. At some point you just end up with a page with hundreds of names on it. is anyone going to read all that to find out if their friends are online? No, they are just going to go to their member page.
Given all that, I don’t think I would dedicate programming resources to creating a “Who is logged on” feature if I were designing forum software in 2019. In the absence of some sort of chat feature (which I’ve never cared about, but understand others have), it’s not really anything but a vague and not super accurate “how active are we” stat.
In that vein, far more interesting would be to better surface some basic daily/weekly/monthly stats. Show members how we’re (hopefully) growing. Maybe even pull out some interesting events that caused higher levels of chatter (new yoyo drop, contest, particularly contentions thread).
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how about “friending” people to get notified or something when they’re online? So it’s not a huge list of people that are online. Lol something like Roblox’s system.
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I would love this feature. It kinda makes you feel like you aren’t the only one online.
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it makes it more of a “social” platform
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Many people who use these forums use them because they hate social platforms
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It would seem from most of the user comments the reason why is obvious and most seem to favor it. And it has nothing at all to do with waiting for someone to reply to a comment or post. If I really wanted someone to reply I could just PM them and be done with it. I just like to see who’s around.
It’s obviously not a feature in the software that can be turned on or off, as that feature is anathema to your philosophy of how forums should work. And obviously a custom feature would be costly to add,
So, sorry I asked… 
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Not necessarily for or against the idea, but where would you put it? On older forum software you would have pages with a limit of the number of topics, then at the bottom of that you would see the “who’s online?” stuff. With Discourse, everything loads as you scroll, so there really isn’t a “bottom” of the page. So, that would mean going to a separate page to view this information - how many people would actually do this? Are people looking for a specific person? In which case they can use the existing feature of seeing when someone was “last seen.”
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Idk guys, this is neither here or there for me. I think Discourse is thoughtfully designed and easy to use.
I’m getting pretty tired of seeing you guys go round and round with @codinghorror. This is his software and he is just as entitled to an opinion about it as the users of this software.
He has a vastly different vantage point from the rest of us, and as someone who strongly dislikes main forms of social media, Discourse is one of his solutions to the many problems associated with it.
So what? Is it wrong to advocate for a more disciplined and thoughtful form of community?
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You’re right let’s just start a discord server for the yye homies
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The section is called “YoYoExpert Site Improvements” where people ask for things they’d like to see in the forum, which I did. If he’d have just said that it’s not a function available in discourse, that would probably have been it. But… 
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Exactly.
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Would it have been though? I don’t think it would have been. It feels like there is a lot of personal grievance coming to the surface publicly lately. I’m getting pretty sick and tired of reading the bickering. It is making this place feel… Not that great.
I don’t care who is perpetuating what, I personally would just like it to stop.
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Sure, he could have said that. But I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect the software dev to not express an opinion about the software when a change is suggested. We all have opinions, why wouldn’t he?
If we asked a yoyo designer to make a yoyo bimetal for the next run, they would be unlikely to answer “The yoyo is not going to be bimetal”. They would probably talk about what they thought about their design being bimetal.
Same thing here.
None of us need to agree with him. But he gets to have an opinions same as the rest of us.
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I still think this function would work smoothest with friending people on the forums, but some people are against that. Can we get a poll?
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Fair enough. I’ll do my part to see it doesn’t happen anymore.
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Discourse is FOSS (free and open source software), so that means you can do absolutely anything you want with it. You can modify discourse, distribute it, and add to it. I don’t think it would cost to add to it, you would just have to code your own thing that says who is online and add it as a plugin.
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I just wish people posted as much tricks or substantial yoyo content as they do rants and opinions 
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Diddo
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