My prediction, based on other boards that have moved to Discourse, is that Discourse will kill this community.
I’m sticking around, hoping I’m wrong, but I think this is the end of the SDMB.
How will Discourse “kill this community”?
Aside from fewer 504 errors, what’s going to be different that could doom the SDMB?
Who had 10:33 in the pool?
Damnit. I didn’t get my guess in soon enough.
I had “immediately after the announcement”, so I’m out.
Can you give us some examples of communities which have been killed by Discord, as well as a rundown of exactly how that occurred?
Discourse.
I’m wondering if confusion with Discord is what is causing some here to be apprehensive.
We’re moving to Discourse, but we are still going to be the SDMB. The page layout is changing a bit, but we still have a banner at the top that says “THE STRAIGHT DOPE MESSAGE BOARD” and under that it has these forums listed:
About This Message Board
Comments on Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports
The Quarantine Zone
General Questions
Great Debates
Politics & Elections
Cafe Society
The Game Room
Thread Games
In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
Marketplace
The BBQ Pit
(that’s a straight copy and paste off of the main page of the test site)
The banner is a lot smaller than what we have now, there’s a link to the straight dope web page to the right of it, and some of the navigation around Discourse is a bit different.
But once you get used to the new layout, it’s the same old SDMB. It’s the same forums, the same posts, just a bit of a different look and feel.
Quoting is a bit more fiddly than vBulletin but it works. It doesn’t link to the quoted post though. That’s one of the few things that vBulletin seems to do better. Most other things aren’t better or worse. They are just different. When you’ve been on a message board for 20 years, you get used to where everything is. Now some things are in a different place. It’s going to take a bit to get used to the new navigation, but once you figure it out, it’s still the SDMB underneath it all, same posts, same users, same everything.
But there are smilies. Lots of smilies. Well, technically there aren’t any smilies since they are called emojis now. But if you think smilies/emojis are going to be the ruin of the SDMB, well, there you go. We’re doomed.
If you mean that all the emojis extant in the world are going to be available to use, that’s not good news to me. I was (barely) okay with the 13 smilies that we have now.
People really should be able to express themselves with their words, and not depend on graphic images of dubious meaning to let us know that they are joking, or stupid, or that they just left a steaming pile in a post.
Perhaps I exaggerate the awfulness. I will try to rein myself in and not anticipate trouble where it may be that none will occur.
(well, I just proved that smilies can’t be made larger; who knew?)
Oops!
I’ve been doing a lot of teleconferencing lately. I’m surprised I’m not replacing every third word with Discord/Zoom/Hangouts/etc.
What about the [noparse]:smack:[/noparse] ( :smack: ) and [noparse]:dubious:[/noparse] ( :dubious: ) smilies? Aren’t those SDMB custom items? Those are the most useful of them all! And while we’re at it, can we please have our old [noparse]:rolleyes:[/noparse] back?
They already are available to use. 
I am seeing that you cannot connect or read a site on discourse unless you’re willing to connect via your google account or your Facebook account.
Is this correct? Or is this to read if not a member? Anyone know?
(Personally, I actively avoid any site that forces me to give access to FB/google, but maybe that’s just me!)
I was curious about Discourse so I Googled around for a random site;
I can read threads and I’m not logged into Facebook or Google in this browser.
Okay, I just created myself an account on their demo site and played with it for a few minutes.
Quoting a post is mildly painful. You have to start by highlighting some or all of the post you want to quote. As soon as you do that, a “Quote” button appears, which you have to click. (I’m working on a desktop mochine. Not sure how that plays on a mobile device.)
But good news: Contrary to what engineer_comp_geek wrote above, the quote box does too include a link to the quoted post. (Is that absent in the new SDMB site that you’ve been playing with?) It appears as an up-arrow in the far upper right corner of the quote box.
Still unknown: Can you create a new post in one thread that quotes another post in a different thread, as you can here at this VB board? And can you create a quote box that has whatever arbitrary text you want to type or paste into it (like if you want to quote a snippet from the Declaration of Independence or the Washington Post or wherever)?
Using emojis can get hopeless when you have a palette of 25000 of them to choose from. Good luck finding just the right one. Can the admins create a custom palette of maybe a dozen or so selected emojis for us to work with? I definitely want the :smack: and :dubious: emoticons, which AFAIK were custom-drawn for SDMB by a user here. (Is that true?)
It might have something to do with the testing site being at a different URL than what it will finally end up being. Good to know that the links are there and they work. Thanks!
I seriously doubt that anyone with admin access to the site has the time to fiddle with things like emojis at the moment, especially when there are so many differing opinions on emojis that some folks are going to be unhappy with them no matter what we do. I would be very surprised if we do any emoji customization.
When I created an account on their demo site, it required a password of at least 10 characters. Is that a parameter that each site administrator can set? It may mean that many of us will have to choose a different password there.
We may all need to learn some different terminology in order to discourse intelligibly about Discourse. What we call a “Forum” they seem to call a “Category”. What we call the “Forum list” they call “Categories”.
What we (and everyone else in the world AFAIK) call a “thread” they seem to call a “topic”.
And their demo instructions make several mentions about the first post in a [del]thread[/del] topic, but I haven’t seen the phrase “original post” or “original poster” or the abbreviation “OP”. I’m sure we will continue to refer to the OP as the OP, as that is a common notation in other message boards too.
It wasn’t immediately obvious how to navigate easily back and forth among the [del]Forum List[/del] Categories page and a [del]thread[/del] topic list and an individual [del]thread[/del] topic. But that isn’t likely to affect me, as I am in the habit of opening those all in separate tabs anyway.
My Safari browser is totally unable to open a Discourse web site, apparently because I have a too-old version and Discourse doesn’t even try to support older versions. :mad: It seems to work with my Firefox browser, although that is not what I would prefer to use because reasons.
I signed up on their demo site ( https://try.discourse.org/ ) without any of that shit. Just give yourself a user-name and a password (must be 10 characters) and your e-mail address and sign up. It sends a confirmation message to your e-mail with a link you have to click to finish the sign-up process.
Their demo site is a small sandboxed site. It has a collection of posts by the Discourse staff with hints on how to use the site. Other than those, the site is wiped clean every day. So you can create [del]threads[/del] topics and posts to play with, but they won’t last long.
At the very top of every thread in VB, there is a navigation menu that looks like this:
that shows the full path through the levels of the board leading to the thread. This is very common on many web sites. I’m not seeing anything that looks equivalent on a [del]thread[/del] topic page there. So if I open a [del]thread[/del] topic through some link other than from the [del]thread[/del] topic list page, I have no idea where that [del]thread[/del] topic is to be found among all the [del]Forums[/del] Categories or [del]thread[/del] topic list pages.
In particular, when I signed up, it immediately started a conversation with me that appears to be a new [del]thread[/del] topic with the title “Greetings!” with an OP by a robot with some boilerplate Welcome remarks. I played with making some posts, and it seems their robot is watching and responding to my posts with more posts of its own.
But I can’t find this [del]thread[/del] topic anywhere among all the [del]thread[/del] lists. I’m beginning to think that it’s a private conversation rather than a public [del]thread[/del] topic, but there’s nothing there that actually indicates that.
I know there’s another example where there was a lot of drama about a move to Discourse but all I can think of now is how Snopes promised a switch over but basically shut down instead.