Then I would like a pony.
Ponies all around
I would like anything but discourse. I really gave it an honest try when thedailywtf changed over. I once saw it described as trying to talk with your tongue cut out and that is a pretty accurate description.
I would probably stop coming here if it was used.
Can’t say I’m personally a giant fan of the looks in the screenies, but no forum I visit has used it in truth, so I have no firsthand experience with it.
My two most commonly used websites are reddit and qt3, and I think their “ugly,” simplistic, text-heavy look is a big part of why I find them enjoyable/navigable. I’m probably a designer’s worst nightmare, but hey, I likes what I like.
All that said, the community and content @ Qt3 are probably good enough that I’d keep on coming even if I thought it was ugly/harder to use/more likely to run over my dog/whatever. So, if the switch were a good thing for everyone overall, I’d deal and usually keep my yap shut :)
What is the deal with Web 12.0 or whatever and it’s obsession with whitespace, giant 24 point font, and dynamic AJAX pageloads that usually fuck up browser conventions?
Discourse falls prey to the same retarded phenomenon.
So no.
The guy who designed this is here in this thread. Even if you don’t like it, maybe try to be a little more civil about it.
And I am sure it is fairly customisable. It could probably be configured to look not dissimilar to QT3 today, but with the advantage of a lot of modern convenience.
I was excited to read the opening post but then I like change. Plus, you know, free hosting for Tom.
Then I saw wumpus’ ugly screenshot. Fantastically terrible screenshot, mostly because of the stickies taking up all the space. This is a better comparison imo:
Not so bad imo, especially considering rapidly advancing open source project vs floundering paid product
I was with you until I actually checked out the thread you linked, and I think their solution is pretty great. Notice the green progress bar overlay on the bottom? That’s better than pages because you can change how many posts render per page, but the post number is static. I hate people saying ‘that was around page 30’, which is almost useless to me because the first thing I do on a forum is maximize the posts per page setting.
So big vote for switching, if only to save Stusser and Tom time and money.
I don’t want to sound too much like a jackass but if wumpus is the designer he should probably have mentioned something to the effect in his original post.
Yes! vBulletin is the shit. No wait, I mean shit. vBulletin is shit. :P
Edit: being inflammatory to counteract the crap being thrown Discourse’s way. I actually don’t think this forum is all that bad, but then again, I’ve customized the look and feel and written a google Chrome extension just to help it fit my personal tastes… so maybe I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt when I shouldn’t.
vBulletin 5 is like being slowly punched in the face.
Just some constructive criticism. vBulletin is clean, crisp and uncluttered without wasting too much screen space.
if this was a vote, I’d vote no. Besides not liking forum change, I really don’t like it. I went to the page and played with it for a while. It’s just annoying to me. No disrespect intended to the designer. It’s just not my thing.
Hey dudes, what if … what if D-O-G really spelled cat? Oh man I’m so baked!
This is probably the most important question, right?
Putting my two cents in, I used to be an avid follower and contributor over at the CheapAssGamer forums. They went through multiple iterations of new forum software, and I eventually stopped going there because of it. Now while CAG is much easier to replace with a Twitter feed than QT3, if this site went to a layout like the original side-by-side from wumpus I’d probably show up a lot less (maybe a positive as far as some people are concerned).
If it were easy to make Discourse look and behave like the forum does now, I’d be all for it. The offer is an extremely generous one and if I were Tom I’d at least look into it.
This is an extremely generous offer, wumpus. Thanks for making it.
While my $.02 is worth probably less than that, I do like the clean, simple approach of the current forums. I’m currently working with a federal program that has just redesigned their application process to include smaller pages, more white space, etc. – while still requiring the same information. The upshot is that it takes 2-3 times as long to enter the data into the online form as it used to, just because you can’t put as much on a page. This experience probably colors my response to Discourse, as I’ve lost about 70 hours of productivity in the last month and am looking at losing another 60+ over the next three weeks to this poorly designed application (which is not at all related to Discourse!)
I can imagine I would get used to Discourse, if we did switch, but like many others here I think I’d want it as flattened as possible. My standard Qt3 use case looks something like this:
Hit my bookmark for “unread threads”
Page through the threads, center clicking to open interesting threads in new (background) tabs.
Close the initial “unread threads” tab when I get to the end, then work my way through all the background tabs until I’ve gone through all the threads I was interested in.
Admittedly, I only played with it for a few minutes, but I couldn’t find a way to do something similar with Discourse (starting with unread – which, since I didn’t set up an account, I might not have seen). Scrolling down the page meant a lot more scrolling, since each topic took up more space and there was a lot more white space. I can see how it would be easier to deal with on a tablet or phone, but generally I’m reading from a PC, not a portable device. However, if Discourse is more tablet/phone friendly, I imagine that would still some of the complaints re: Tapatalk and the like, which might also be good.
I’m not going to speak for Tom but we’ve discussed it.
One thing I want to reiterate - this isn’t my software, but I’m pretty sure most of the issues people have with it can be fixed with style changes, etc, and aren’t just “the way things are” like they are with most current forum software. I could be wrong, but it seems that way to me.
First off, hat’s off to Jeff for the offer. Hosting for a site like this isn’t exactly cheap, and neither is time spent maintaining the site.
vBulletin looks clean on the outside, but on the inside it’s got a lot of issues which a switch to Discourse would presumably address. I don’t know how much the Discourse themes could be modified, but given the distance between here and there, it would probably take a good bit of work. I also don’t know how much modifying the theme, especially heavily, would make it difficult to keep the site up-to-date as Discourse moves through versions. I’ve maintained a few heavily modified phpBB boards and I always dreaded every time I got an email notification that phpBB had updated.
As for my opinion, I’m not wild about the look of Discourse, but we’ve all adjusted as even this site has transitioned through the years. My main issues are the user avatars on the topic pages and the extra stuff at the bottom of each post in the post view. I’m assuming the test Discourse board has everything turned on so you can see what it would look like and what you can do. I think some monkeying with the theme to add definition between posts and the white space would be nice as well, and some color in the background would help it look less like text on a huge white field of nothing.
I would not mind it. But the templates of discourse had to change to look more like a forum, and less like a blog comment section.
Stuff like limited width on the posts, or the floating title panel, I don’t like… but I guest these are a few hacks in a CSS that can be changed pretty quick. The same with the colours: Discourse uses different colours!!
It wouldn’t be. The entire point of Discourse, as explicitly stated by its developers, is to be a Web 2.0 reimagining of forum software. The infiniscroll, the obsessive AJAXiness of it, even the stupid click counters, are all part of that philosophy.