Patreon and Q23 switching away from vBulletin

I am the lurker you deserve…

Pff. You have nothing on my Ars Technica account. Nine posts in a decade.

Zak, you must make every effort to stay!
I’m a minor-league tin foil hatter, and I’ll be forced to lamely speak my mind without my major-league bro carrying the torch!

You’re a disgrace.

At the very least, Zak, hang around while we see if we can find a working solution for you. EVERYTHING on Discourse comes through an API that doesn’t require JavaScript, so it may be possible to use that fact to support tin foil qt3 browsing.

If I have time I can scrape something up for Zak and others, possibly with pages too!

Just … need … time …

aaand if willing I could try fork discourse and do some user side “hide avatars” toggles. Possibly wumpus may like it and accept a pull request…

Part of my hopes this is just an alt account, created to make this specific joke 6 years in the future ;)

Your best bet for the avatars would be to make it a plugin, most likely. That keeps it out of Discourse core, which makes it easier to implement, test, and deploy.

Though, for super long threads it seems to have a results cap. So, I don’t know how that will work.

You also can filter threads to a single user. If you’re viewing a thread, click on somebody’s avatar and then click the filter button on the user profile card. That way, if you know you’re looking for a post from somebody specific, you can find it more easily.

Edit: some info here: https://forum.qt3.us/t/user-cards-are-the-shizzle-yo/228/12?u=clay

As Clay mentioned, you can apply other types of filters. Also, if your search results for a thread return over 100 entries, you will generally want to refine the search terms a bit. Ain’t nobody got time to follow 300 hits.

All in all, the search experience is much better on Discourse.

Wendelius

Nice!

Yeah, I was attempting to search the infinite scroll threads for posts by specific users, and it got a bit hairy as the thread went on, that kind of sorting solves the issue, though, I think most people will attempt a simple username search on the top right hand side first, as that is how we are programmed to search for things on a browser.

All part of the learning process.

I have a question for Tom involving front page integration. My assumption on how it works, based on reading these threads, is that a post on the front page generates a new forum thread.

Let’s say that Tom wants to make a post on the front page about the rumored Gwent standalone game, and he does so, thus creating a new forum thread for the Gwent standalone game. But, the people on this board never sleep, so they have already created a thread for it, and it already has ten posts. You’ve effectively split the discussion into two topics, which will 1) clutter up the board, and 2) force people to have the discussion in both threads along the lines of “Well, which one should we use? This one already has the discussion, but the other one is the one linked from the front page…”

So I guess I’m wondering whether this has been considered, or if it’s even a problem. Is there a way to choose when making a front page post whether you want to create a new thread or attach an existing one?

It’s super easy to merge topics, so perhaps an existing thread could be merged into a front page thread?

Wow, so this is actually happening, huh? That’s kind of amazing. Good luck with the migration y’all.

According to wumpus’ migration post, folks who come across front page articles and want to comment, will need to create a forum account to post.

  • Front page WordPress integration, so there will be one associated topic for each blog post, and replies to that topic will show up on the blog. Writing a “comment” will require clicking through to the forum and joining.

Since these are vetted/approved and users can’t login w/ Google/Facebook, etc comments up front may be a bit sparsely populated by newcomers.

With how important having a correct email address is to the migration, I’d suggest trying to get the word out. A note on the front page, a tweet, a youtube video, etc something to let people who maybe don’t come or post as often to get in and check their settings before it all goes down.

That bums me out a little. I will genuinely miss those folks who show up to gripe about the way Tom scores, and his lack of “objectivity”, since I doubt they’ll bother to get vetted and create an account. Though Tom probably won’t.

As I understand it, you can have more than 1 level of user. You could have automatically vetted level 1 users who can only post in the article comments section of the forum. Fully vetted users could post anywhere.

So you could still preserve drive by comments and allow regular posters to chime in while keeping the bulk of the forum a separate entity.

Wendelius

Tom said a couple pages back that front page commenters wouldn’t have to be vetted.