Some fairly big updates to Devtalk (June 2025)

[Devtalk]

Hi Everyone

Some of you may have noticed we’ve been working on some cool Devtalk updates these past few months, well, these are now complete

In Short:

• We’ve updated the Devtalk homepage and front-end system
• We’ve updated our PragProg errata system
• We’ve introduced a new AI category
• We’ve added In The News sections to all main categories

In more detail…

Devtalk Homepage and Front-End System

In short, there are now more pages on our own front-end system:

Category Listings and Category Filters, eg:

Previously we just had Filter By:, now we also have sub-category filters.

#Tag Portals

We now have a portal for any #tag - which gives you the same trending lists as our main portals. This means you no-longer need to rely on us to create portals (such as devtalk.com/elixir) as every tag on the forum now has a tag portal, eg: devtalk.com/tags/nvidia, devtalk.com/tags/chatgpt, there’s even one for devtalk.com/tags/musk

Can you still request a portal being set up? Yes - though it only really makes sense to set these up for languages or frameworks which have a public repo and/or post official blog posts on an RSS enabled blog (as portals pull in the latest release info and blogs).

Links now keep you on the front-end

…unless you specifically want to go on to the forum.

For instance on these:

All of the links now keep you on the front-end apart from the link at the bottom right, which takes you straight to the last post on the forum.

Thread Previews

When you click through to a thread (from the title via one of the above) you are now taken to a thread preview:

This includes the first post, and then underneath, either:

• Any post that has been marked as the solution
• Up to three of the most-liked posts
• Or if a post exists but does not qualify for the above, the first post as per the screenshot

These previews also contain a Where Next section, which includes a link to the thread on the forum as well as links to any related /portals or #tag pages (or book pages if there’s a related PragProg errata-enabled book).

The nav/breadcrumbs in the top now also keep you on our front-end system:

PragProg Errata System

This has now been updated to make it easier for both authors and readers to browse threads for books, and whenever a book thread receives a post from an author (for instance to acknowledge a fix) they can mark the thread as solved and a tick will show with that thread, eg:

New AI Category

AI has been a huge topic these past couple of years and there’s no doubt it’s going to get even bigger, so we’ve now created a parent category for AI topics with the corresponding front-end category/portal: devtalk.com/ai - if you’ve not ventured into, have a look, there have been some really interesting AI related discussions!

New ‘In The News’ Sections

Every main category now has an In The News section. Use this if you find any interesting article or blog post (that you have not written yourself - if you’ve written it yourself, use one of the Blog Posts sections). Our CommunityNews bot now aims to post in one of these instead of the original In The News section which was in the General Dev category.

Related, the old News sections have now been renamed to Official News, and now only our NewsBot can post official news in them.

And more!

There have been other minor tweaks here and there too, but the above are all the major changes. There will be one deprecation, and that’s we’ll be removing all additional forum themes as they are just too much to maintain. We’ll instead focus on our default theme and perhaps look at introducing a proper dark mode later.

Ok! That’s it for this update! Thank you all for bearing with us while we’ve been working on these changes - we hope you like the updates!

[gflashner]

We are really in the era of AI apps

[mindriot]

One relatively small bit of feedback, it is really quite annoying to get to the forum from the homepage on mobile, to the extent that I now just bookmark the forum and skip the homepage entirely. Before I used to browse the top few topics and then go through one of those to get to the forum discussion but now there is an extra jump in that route and the forum button is a long long long scroll on the home page. Maybe a burger menu with anchors through the homepage sections or something similar might make it easier to look at the top few items in each section, get to the login, get to the forum.

[AstonJ]

@gflashner

We are really in the era of AI apps

We are indeed - it’s going to be an interesting few years that’s for sure! It could end up being very good… or very bad! Let’s hope it’s not the latter

@mindriot

and the forum button is a long long long scroll on the home page

If you click on filter by category..

There’s a link to the forum at the bottom:

[mindriot]

Appreciate the tip, personally it makes a huge difference as I was finding that really annoying. It might still be generally valid feedback in terms of making it a little more discoverable. I had always thought this was for filtering the topic cards by category rather than as a means of navigation in general which normally I would expect to be behind a very different UX pattern. (To that point the fact it says “hide menu” instead of “hide filters” is an indication of the UX conflict I’m speaking to).

[AstonJ]

Yeah it’s not ideal tbh Toby. When we move to our custom platform there will be no separate forum so it will be a much more cohesive experience : )

One thing I forgot to say is you can actually still click straight through to the forum - just click on the timestamp in the bottom right (it will take you to the last post in the thread)

[mindriot]

Ah that is nice, subtle but is close to how I normally use it on my phone. On my phone I tend to have a look through some recent news and topics and then either go through an item to get to the forum (because even with this new information I’m now half way down the page) or check the discussion on an item of interest and then have a browse of the forum in general. In both cases I usually want to check the discussion a bit, sometimes the topic itself I would go to anyway but often it might depend on whether the discussion indicates that I might want to follow up or not so in both main cases this is better for me even if not obvious.

And I also don’t mean this to make negative comments on the overall changes, everything is looking pretty nice it was as I say a fairly small annoyance for me that can be potentially considered in future updates . Thanks also for the suggestions that make it easier to avoid the specific issues

[AstonJ]

@mindriot

And I also don’t mean this to make negative comments on the overall changes, everything is looking pretty nice it was as I say a fairly small annoyance for me that can be potentially considered in future updates . Thanks also for the suggestions that make it easier to avoid the specific issues

No worries Toby. The funny thing is I actually prefer it on mobiles now as it’s a lot quicker to see what the thread is about than having to wait for the forum to load (which is an SPA so is noticeably slower on initial load). The thing I dislike most about the current set up is the front-end to discourse lag, as every time you view a thread from the front-end it has to load discourse.

When we do our custom platform we’ll probably have a dedicated mobile view (like Discourse). Atm it is just a simple responsive design.

@mindriot

everything is looking pretty nice

Glad you think so - hopefully this will see us through until we sort out our custom platform

@mindriot

now just bookmark the forum

Forgot to say there’s nothing wrong with this at all, in fact this is how I envisaged our power users would be using the forum - you can unmute the in-the-news and newsbot tags and then all the threads that show on the homepage will show on the forum as well

[mindriot]

@AstonJ

which is an SPA so is noticeably slower on initial load

That is interesting as I hadn’t really noticed. I’m mainly doing so from the sofa on WiFi rather than out and about but I hadn’t actually noticed much in general usage that it was meaningfully slow.

On the other points that does make sense. There has always been a little bit of a disconnect between the portal element and the forum element, it is pretty exciting that this gap will close at some point and the integration can be more seamless. As always thanks for all the effort you put in, neither here nor elixir forum would be the same without it (which I do still read BTW I just haven’t been involved enough in that stuff to make meaningful contributions recently just reading to keep a beat on the ecosystem).

[AstonJ]

I’m guessing you have a really fast connection - mine’s not bad (300mbs) but even I sometimes get the loading dots momentarily when it loads a discourse page. Unfortunately discourse has become a little bloated, though the same happens to most forum platforms when they get to that age - as they keep adding things that people want/need.

@mindriot

As always thanks for all the effort you put in, neither here nor elixir forum would be the same without it (which I do still read BTW I just haven’t been involved enough in that stuff to make meaningful contributions recently just reading to keep a beat on the ecosystem).

Aw thanks Toby! Thanks to you and everyone else too - the forums wouldn’t be the same without you

[mindriot]

@AstonJ

I’m guessing you have a really fast connection - mine’s not bad (300mbs)

Yeah it isn’t really representative of average usage, we have 1gb fibre into the home here plus probably reasonably good caching the majority of the time for the assets. Either way SPAs also trend to suffer on initial load with the amount of data they have to get from the server to start working after the assets have come through so it is still pretty good that side of things is pretty much unnoticeable too and it does suggest that a more bespoke solution has much potential to leverage the server side performance to benefit a fairly average connection and use with mobile data.