Having played with their demo site sporadically over the last couple of hours, I’m not seeing any obvious total deal-breakers yet.
Interesting sight-em:
There’s a [del]thread[/del] topic there discussing one of Cecil’s old columns, Do microwave ovens kill bacteria?
:dubious:
Well, you won’t be able to say “:dubious:” any more. :mad: That one doesn’t seem to exist, as far as I can tell.
Nor can you say “:smack:” either.
Also, [noparse]:mad: and :sad: [/noparse] don’t work.
And [noparse][/noparse] doesn’t work to get you colored text. I don’t know if there’s another way – haven’t seen any mention of it yet.
Hooray! No more [color=red]evil red warnings from the moderators!
But also no more orange quotes from the Orange One SAD! :sad:
Waitaminnit! :sad: doesn’t work? What’s the BBCode for the sad-face?
ETA: 
Oh, okay. I get it. It’s just [noparse]:([/noparse] – Hey, I knew that. I think. That probably works in Discourse.
Since we’re on the subject, don’t forget my petition for a Puke and a Heart Smiley. 
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
It’s almost 12 hours since the OP dropped the turd that kicked off this [del]thread[/del] topic. We’re still waiting for an explanation. <taps foot>
i’m not crazy about posting styles that overuse smilies/emojis, like peppering a post or lining up long strings of them, and I use them very sparingly myself, but it seems to me that they have a non-trivial utility. Online discussions are like casual conversations but missing key aspects of body language–expression, tone of voice, often other contextual clues. These kinds of things are important to reducing ambiguity in human communication.
Dubious and facepalm are part of the Unicode emoji set. I haven’t made a test account but I’m about 99% sure that Discourse supports that functionality.
It does, if you can find them. You can select emojis from their palette (good luck finding the one you want, there are so many of them) or you can type a BBCode like :xxxx: where xxxx in the name of the emoji. I tried [noparse]:dubious:[/noparse] for :dubious: and that didn’t work. Do you know its correct name?
I often find myself wishing I could use a :smack: in my other online communications. It will be a shame if the destruction of its only remaining habitat renders it extinct.
Based on some comments above I was worried that non-members would not be able to read the board - I think we get a lot of users stumbling across us via a Google search and many will become valued members of the dope. So I trust this will still be possible. Looking at examples of other Discourse forums I think you will be although I didn’t particularly like the design or performance of any of the fora I looked at. They didn’t all look the same however.
What? We’re becoming a bread baking site? That’s just crumbly!
I think it’s just the way Discourse has it set up on their own site. Supports Google and Facebook login doesn’t mean it’s required. As far as I can tell, Discourse offers both the forum software alone for you to self-host (which I think is what SDMB is doing) as well as a “turn key” forum running on Discourse’s infrastructure. if what you’re looking at requires a Google or FB login, that’s just the way they set it up. Everything TubaDiva has said about the transition reads as though SDMB is sticking with local (native) logins.
My understanding is that it’s hosted on their site but it’s our baby.
It will make maintenance on the site easier for sure.
We have custom tailored the site to make it look more like what we’re used to. It will not have the full functionality of some of the things you find in plain Discourse because they’re things we don’t particularly need. (Like the crowd moderation.)
There’s much still to be explored and over time we hope to be able to offer more to you as appropriate for the community and the site. (Not sure yet what that might be, just saying in general.)
I ask you to have an open mind and a lot of patience as we move into this; it’s new stuff for all of us and we need to learn it all together in a pile.
It will be fun to figure this out with you and see what’s happening in this century. 
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Discourse is not compatible with many message boards, but it might work for SDMB.
To have a good Discourse board, you have to have mindful board members who actually quote what they’re responding to and not just click the Reply button.
It’s a little more work on the poster than our current setup–there’s another button you have to click–but it’s a lot less work on the readers, who would otherwise have to click yet another button and scroll through a bunch of stuff just to find out what the hell you’re responding to.
But our culture here is to show specifically what you’re replying to, and I hope that holds. Otherwise, it’ll be nigh impossible to keep up with active threads.
Another problem we might run into are the Trust Levels. There are 4 trust levels, and typical users can only access the first 3. The 4th is granted by Admin fiat. How do you get a higher trust level? By showing up day after day, posting stuff, starting threads, and earning badges.
What these trust levels do are to separate users into three categories, newbies, members, and regulars. How much attention the system pays to reports is governed by the reporter’s trust level.
Which brings us to Discourse automatically hiding posts. This alone may make the software incompatible with the SDMB. If enough people of the right trust levels flag a post–it could be just one flag from a TL3 against a TL1, or it could be several flags from TL2s against another TL2–the post is automatically hidden.
The post is then locked for 10 minutes. After that time, the poster is allowed to edit the offending post, which reposts it. If it’s flagged by the community again, it’s hidden such that only the mods can restore it.
Lastly, you’ll find that much of the internal workings of Discourse is likes driven. Thread rankings is almost entirely governed by likes.
But Discourse is free, and the constant timeouts will eventually kill the Straight Dope, so something’s gotta be done. Our culture is going to change, though. Some of the worst of Discourse’s features might be mitigated in the admin controls, but a lot of it is hard-wired in. So we’ll need to find ways to keep the board from breaking without breaking the community here and turning us into just another online clone.
Oh, and just so you know now, don’t bother looking for a Mark all as read function. There isn’t one.
And you can’t delete PMs, either, only archive them.
The one thing I was wondering about the emoji is whether they would automatically replace the smilies in the older threads. It would be nice if they did.
And, contrary to other posts, if they’re using all the emoji from Unicode (which they appear to be), then all of the current smileys are represented:
🤦:slightly_smiling_face:
I admit that confused (top right) leaves a bit to be desired, but I think surrounding it with ?s makes it work: ?? The rest are fine as is, IMHO.
And apparently you can in fact type : and then start typing words to pick an emoji, and default smileys like 
and are autoreplaced to their emoji equivalents.
I was specifically told they had disabled all the community moderation stuff, somehow. This is exactly what I was talking about–the fact that the community can moderate posts–make them vanish–due to their trust levels.
I meant to actually come back and ask if trust levels had been removed altogether, as they are fundamentally incompatible with the board culture, where posters who do not post often or post more controversial posts are just as valued as other posters. Trust levels are the reason we suggested you not pick Discourse.
As for likes: I would hope that you’d disable them altogether. You said you modified the style as much as possible to look like the old site, and you can hide those buttons with CSS.
I don’t share the idea that we should have to accept these changes. Discourse is not the only option where the site is hosted for you. There was a reason we were having a discussion on the best way to go, and I’m kinda feeling like that thread was completely ignored. The only way it wouldn’t be is if y’all figured out a way to, as I said, nuke those undesirable aspects.
I don’t want this board actually becoming an echo chamber because all the posts no one likes are hidden, and thus no one can post anything that someone else might hide. Again, no community moderation.
I’m pretty certain that neither of those things are possible. Not entirely, at least.
Trust levels are part and parcel of the Discourse philosophy, and I don’t think they can be fully turned off.
Likewise, likes. Part of the underlying software. But the number of likes any person can give in a day can be regulated (10, IIRC, is the minimum), and that number increases with trust level. While they can’t be turned off altogether, admin could set the number as low as possible, which would cause people to be sparing with their likes.
One further potential issue is how Discourse handles flags.
If you write three posts that each get one flag, that’s three strikes on your permanent record.
If you write three posts that each get five flags, that’s fifteen strikes.
Why does this matter? Because if you get enough strikes–often as low as five–you will be forever unable to progress beyond trust level 2.
Now, this is for confirmed flags, meaning that a mod has to confirm that the post was against the rules. Mods can also clear flags, which means no strikes at all. But one bad post can rack up a truly impressive number of strikes, depending not on how bad the post was but on how many people flagged it.
But enough naysaying. Some good things about Discourse.
At a certain trust level (usually 2), you’ll be able to move your own threads. Useful for when you oops your Pit thread into GQ.
Likewise, you can edit your own thread titles for when you oops I wear red shirts title into I wear red shits.
You can turn your own OPs into wikis, which means that anybody can edit your post.
(Assuming, of course, that admin doesn’t turn off those functionalities.)
Posts show how many replies were made to it, and there is a button that lets you scroll through just the replies to a given post.
Tuba already responded in the other thread (I hate when we have multiple threads on the same topic on the same board) saying there won’t be likes and community moderation and so on
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22347550&postcount=26