Hey, wumpus, you could carefully and conscientiously shepherd a well-established–dare I say grizzled and stubborn–community to your lush green pastures, or you could shove us along being dismissive, vociferous, and patronizing. Which one do you think will help us make the transition you are hoping for? I hope you’re not Discourse’s main sales/PR guy.
One nice feature that I saw discourse had was the ability to use @ inline to ‘tag’ people, and they’d get a nice little ping notification.
If it is modularized enough, surely you can have the underlying tech be discourse while it still looking like “vbulletin” - except “modern” and quicker…
What is the point of pinging someone? I am not being snarky. I’m not even sure what this means but my guess is it means you get a notification that someone replied to your post? As long as I can turn that off, I’m fine with that.
Another thing I was thinking about that I see in other forums is threads where some messages are hidden. I don’t really like this either. Is that a feature of Discourse?
Lets say I’m posting in a thread about asparagus icecream. Knowing that you love asparagus, I could post “I bet @MarkAsher would enjoy this fine confection!” and you’d get a notification.
It doesn’t hide posts by default, no.
Yeah, I think the @ tag can be pretty intrusive and that person will feel obligated to reply.
In other forums, you get a notification every time someone mention your nick in a post whether that post was in direct reply to yours or not.
It shouldn’t be every time your nick is mentioned, the user has to type an @ sign before it. It’s a deliberate action.
You can prevent people from stalking you in this manner by checking the “Keep your profile activity private” box in the settings menu under “Profile”. Unless there is some workaround that I am unaware of?
Migrations are hard and usually involve many tweaks, every one requires a fair bit of back and forth to get right, plus the inevitable spring cleaning of migration. We charge $2,400 for migrations (aka an agreement for one full year of business hosting) – if you’d like to sponsor a test migration, I am all for it. Otherwise, no offense, but I really do need a fair level of certainty before proceeding and committing that much effort to it.
Browse around on whatever tickles your fancy at Discourse customers | Discourse - Civilized Discussion and pretend the like button and likes are no longer there.
In practical terms this means Tom needs to sign off on it as “reasonably likely to go forward” before we can start migrating stuff from this site, even in a test capacity.
I think what people are talking about is a test site that’s tweaked towards the look and feel of the current forums (which the main Discourse site is very different from), not an actual migration of any kind. That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would take that much effort, but if it is, fair enough.
I agree with all of this.
Likes to me are associated with toxic forums, I’d rather avoid them. (and no, it’s not just the one some of you might be thinking of)
How To Geeks perhaps have the closest and cleanest look and feel to QT3
Is that one considered toxic?
I was just about to post that.
Nice design and layout, avatars on, no likes. It is the best exmple from the Discourse site I could find that would best represent how a QT3 would end up.
wumpus’ relacitrance to put even a modicum of effort into showing off the shiny software he created, w/ Qt3 in mind no less, has utterly torpedoed any interest I had. I’ve looked at Discourse quite a lot. It’s generally ugly. How-to-geek, while inoffensive is too stark. vBulletin, with all of its archaic cruft, is utterly more pleasant to actually read. The inline video stuff is also a turn-off, unless it’s a toggle. Based on How-To-Geek, it isn’t. Taking control away from users seems sort of bad?
To create an empty Discourse instance, w/ a ‘Qt3-themed’ set of color themes, disabled likes, even if you can’t accommodate the apparently too high-tech avatar toggle, seems like an awfully low barrier to engender good will.
You should be able to theme Discourse to look like a regular forum like phpbb or xenforo, right? Probably entirely with CSS?
I will offer three-quarter portions.
I jsut don’t know why Discourse needs every little thing A) to be shown in every little place, and B) to be represented by big bubbly intrusive graphics and colors. It’s a forum, man–there’s just not that much UI to convey! :)
Anyway, I’ll admit part of my dislike from that stuff arises from a goofy reason, but I’d be a lot less able to dick around on Qt3 at work if it was as busy and graphics-laden as Discourse forums I’ve seen. The relative sparseness of Qt3 (esp. w/ avatars turned off) makes the fact that it’s gaming-related a lot less evident than having something covered in avatar-bubbles, in-line images, in-line video, etc.
(Yes, despite donating for an avatar a loooong time ago, I actually have them turned off)
In my experience it is difficult to conceptualize the change completely until you have live data and live accounts, e.g. a migration.
Totally willing to do that if Tom signs off on it to a reasonable degree, as stated earlier.
How to geek site is a good starting point.
https://discuss.howtogeek.com/
Also, Lowell at HTG is an expert in how to make money with a website doing stuff that is useful and practical. His ad business has also declined a fair bit over time; his current thinking is a Wirecutter like strategy where most of the money comes from Amazon product recs. Wirecutter does make an absolute killing and not an “ad” in sight. Something to think about, Tom, if you get a small cut of the game / console / hardware being reviewed or discussed. Perhaps that aspect could be amplified. Also, Discourse does have an Amazon affiliate plugin which auto-adds your affiliate code to any Amazon links.