Because it’s lightweight, gives a useful timeline view, doesn’t delete your post when you try and edit it when using the mobile skin, … It also allows you to aggregate the forums you browse on mobile in one place and jump from one to the other quickly.
Tapatalk has its annoyances and they sometimes make the UI near unusable. But when it comes to browsing the forum on mobile, it leaves the current Qt3 mobile skin in the dust.
Wendelius
To address the bandwidth performance concerns, Discourse is a JavaScript app. It only sends over the wire the JSON data (e.g. the actual posts text, poster name, etc) necessary to render the page, and the JS client in your browser renders the page – compare this with a traditional website which sends a full load of HTML for every page. You can verify this yourself using the F12 console in your browser while browsing any Discourse site, look at the network transfers and you’ll see tiny amounts of data going across.
If you were literally building a website to accommodate low and near-zero bandwidth scenarios, it would look much like Discourse already does… one caveat, we do send avatars down to the browser, but always at the correct size.
Didn’t Tom say quite explicitly that most of the money the site ads generated were from the forum?
I think this was one of the most useful conclusions from the previous topic as well. But we need a full dump of the forum data to do a conversion. These are usually quite tweaky, requiring quite a bit of back and forth touchups to get it just right. Every migration is its own unique snowflake.
It’s definitely a good idea to set up a test migration site, but we normally charge $2,400 for migrations (one year of business hosting) because they are a fair bit of manual work and the aforementioned back and forth. So before we do that, I’d like to hear from Tom directly that we are cool moving ahead with explicit approval and a reasonable chance of success, let’s say 75% or so. Nothing is written in stone, of course, but I don’t want to go to all that trouble if the Shadowy Powers That Be have a non-small chance of pulling the rug out from under the whole initiative.
Is Broken Forum Discourse-based? I like some of the features over at BF. I don’t really mind either way - Qt3 is more about the people than the software behind it - as long as my bookmark doesn’t change I don’t really care. :)
Read the original topic closely; the problems with vBulletin are covered in GREAT depth there with many concrete examples. Just filter to my posts if you want the specifics (this is a one-click operation in Discourse, click the avatar, click filter.)
Even a blank temp install where we need to create temporary user accounts and has no existing discussions is fine. It’s about the aesthetic, and seeing the Discourse configuration options w avatars optional and sigs/likes-disabled.
Avatars optional was not on Tom’s list, and I wouldn’t recommend that. Sigs were never allowed in Discourse, ever. So the main difference is “imagine the like button isn’t there”, does that require a new blank Discourse be in place? Couldn’t you visit any Discourse instance, anywhere, and wish the like button into the cornfield?
Considering one of the benefits of being a Patreon supporter is that you get an avatar…
Wouldn’t a site migration be possible to do by the people using the forum themselves - provided they have the necessary access and some database knowledge? Certainly there’s a template for vbulleting database format to discourse (or there should be one)?
I’d think the best case to be made for a Discourse would to check out a mock site. But ofcourse, as another poster alluded to, you kinda need the frontpage to be reworked to work with it, and probably could do with a tiny bit of modernization.
The Try.discourse one was quick and modern, but it didn’t seem as “clean” as I would prefer (but could get used to I’m sure…)
(You can check it out here : http://try.discourse.org/ ) Course, it is probably using a basic theme so I guess it is possible to change it around a lot? (Course, my idea of a clean site is black background, console fonts and ascii layout, and probably orange text :) )
I have zero dogs in this fight. vBulletin, Discourse, I’m game for whatever. So consider whatever votes my piddly $3/month Patreon contribution represents to be abstentions.
I’m against a switch, because I’m a dinosaur who doesn’t like sites that require Javascript to function correctly.
I fully support progress and moving away from vBulletin. I’ve had the mobile skin eat too many posts.
I’d be okay with a move to discourse
I’m not thrilled with a change, because for my personal usage needs there isn’t anything the current site isn’t doing (I don’t visit QT3 via mobile, so I avoid a lot of the apparent issues). I come here for the gaming discussions, not back-patting ‘Likes’ and embedded videos and such. I’m also horribly particular about themes/fonts/minimalism/etc., - I’m the one that begged stusser for the Grayfolio theme (grey! all grey! subdued and boring as you can get!), I disable avatars, etc. - The QT3 logo, a couple of ad bars, and that’s about as much as I see graphically - or need to see.
That said, it isn’t like I’m going anywhere else if it does change. I’ll grumble and gripe about the eye-searing amount of 100% #FFF wasted whitespace, ‘wrong’ fonts, inability to disable likes/avatars and whatever, because I’m old enough now to have a lawn and request you kindly remove yourself from it. But I don’t exactly frequent anyplace else unless linked to from a forum post here. And that’ll probably continue.
I will admit - I still hate the blinding whiteness, but running the try.discourse.org site at 80% or 90% browser scale decreases my hate quite a bit. I tend to forget to do that in this age of 24pt fonts everywhere.
I should have asked as a follow up question… does discourse have a tapatalk equivalent that works on windows phone? I am not married to tapatalk, in fact I hate it in a number of ways, but it’s far superior to viewing these forums on a mobile browser and being the only forum I visit I am not savvy on other solutions or what discourse does in the mobile area.
Funny that you would say that. I’m a full-stack web developer (which these days mostly means developing MVC/reactive Javascript-based client applications running on the browser, with most server functionality reduced to a JSON API for the client to call, along with the odd websocket interface), but I’m older than usual, and even though I can see many advantages in the modern client-focused, Javascript-heavy paradigm, I still kinda like websites that don’t need Javascript to work. I should say that, when I started doing web development, my first websites had to work with text-based browsers like Lynx, so Javascript wasn’t really an option. :)
I’m fine with the current software. I’m not a power user so I don’t really feel like I’m missing much. I prefer a sedate background and a forum that is very heavy on text and light on graphics. I actually am worried if it’s easier to post graphics via drag and drop we will start getting more and more posts with graphics, which some may love but I probably will not. I abhor likes so I hope those are completely hidden.
I don’t really look at the forum too much via mobile so I really have no complaints there. Everything seems to work fine for me here. I can jump directly to new posts in a forum and that’s about all I need. I don’t really need an entire discussion threaded. I’d prefer not having to deal with change since I’m content with the as-is, but mostly it comes down to what the majority of the people want.
This. Plus push notifications on replies (if you want them). Easy posting of images from a mobile device. And a good night mode.
I vote XenForo ;)
I prefer the look of Vbulletin to Discourse. Now I don’t have a super strong preference, but I would prefer not changing just for the sake of moving to the shine new software. For me its a learning curve. I’m generally active/semi-active on 3-7 forums at time. Right now 4 use vbulletin, 1 use is Discus, and 1 uses some other awful forum software. Now the one that uses the awful forum software isn’t particularly active, and for all I know maybe it isn’t all that awful. But I really don’t have a motivation to learn to use it. So my concern with Discourse is because it is new and will be unique to QT3, I’d just rather not be troubled learning something new.
There are lot of features in Vbulletin that Tom doesn’t use that I’d like to see added…
As long as the various needs and wants that some folks listed above are met, I don’t see why we shouldn’t let the money talk–man’s gotta eat, you know? :-)
Actually, how about that–why don’t we let people pledge (Patreon, paypal, whatever) to their preferred software, and go with the winner? (Granted, wumpus will have given Discourse a pretty big head start…)
That is Xenforo, which offers a ton of modern features but still looks like a traditional forum. I prefer it to vB myself, and it would be much lower-friction for users unaccustomed to change. But not enough to go through the effort and expense to switch, I’d hasten to add.
Note that I’m talking about my effort and Tom’s expense. That doesn’t apply to a Discourse migration, which would be wumpus’ minions effort and free.