If I had a nickel for every time someone predicted the board was doomed over the past 20 years, I would be a very rich man.
On the bright side, we’re all getting older and dying off anyhow. In another ten, twenty years the ancient doper specimen will probably be extinct. But that doesn’t mean we can’t all have a super fun retirement home to wheel around in and cause trouble. 
And if we really wanted to bring new people in there are lots of things we could do to facilitate that. Not that we necessarily want to do any of those things, but we do have options. The biggest obstacle is that none of us actually own the board, so we might need permission for any massive changes, which may or may not be granted.
But just some ideas of things we could do are AMA’s like reddit has.
An informational area full of the weirdest, wackiest news and factoids we can find, which would need to be google searchable, as would the AMA’s. People first got into the dope because of the column. We probably wouldn’t be allowed to create a new Cecil just for the forum, but we could still do the same thing “he” did on the forum. As long as it was searchable by google. The more interesting info we have on here that is easy to find, and the better we are at using SEO, the more popular we’ll become.
That was the puzzling part of your post. You didn’t ask for clarification. You simply quoted GraysonCarlisle and wrote the same question again.
Since the question had already been answered and you noted in your post that you had been told directly the same answer, I was puzzled about why you would be getting clarification for the third time.
I thought you might not have seen the second clarification, so I quoted it and posted it to you.
I don’t think anyone here knows all the answers to the questions about the set up since it wasn’t chosen by anyone here. Multiple clarifications won’t change that.
Not only did I read the entire thread, I read your post several times. In fact, I referenced your post in my post as “in post #33 before your last post” showing that I read your post in the thread after post 33. I would also ask you to read posts more carefully before responding. You should have read that and known that I read your post.
Thanks! I’m looking forward to the migration. Have a great day as well. BigT.
There’s an old joke about the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he reached the 40th floor someone asked him how it’s going, and he said “so far, so good”.
It seems widely accepted that the board has been heading steadily downhill over the years, and that if this longstanding trend continues, the board will inevitably die. Irrespective of whether this or that decision did or will contribute to that decline, crowing triumphantly about past predictions of doom in the face of that dynamic is silly, as above.
I’ll be happy as long as the fucker loads. Ironically, I had a much longer post typed out and it was eaten by a VB outage.
Who crowed triumphantly? It was just a wry remark. Messageboards in general have been declining, and maybe we’re Betamax. At some point, this board will no longer exist, or be transformed beyond recognition. But people have been exclaiming about how this board was about to die ever since I joined. Sometimes it was because we went pay-to-post, sometimes it was because we banned a popular poster, sometimes it was because we prohibited certain words in one forum, sometimes it was because we changed the smilies. Let’s just say I have a wait-and-see attitude.
I’m not going to bother with the change to Discourse; so, so long and all that.
Ale, that’s too bad. If I may inquire, why?
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Me neither. I was never a huge contributor here, but I’m out. I’ve been on other discourse forums before and it’s just never been a platform that “flows” well to my brain. Also the lack of Tapatalk support. I’ve mainly been a lurker and probably should have spoken up about it in the other Tapatalk discussions, but its utility doesn’t just lie in providing a mobile native UI, but in aggregating multiple forums. So, a poorly implemented discourse-specific app is not really an alternative.
I’ve been losing interest anyway. I won’t point fingers, but the past few years I simply find the content and discussions far less engaging.
As they say on Shark Tank, for those reasons, I’m out. It’s been a fun ride, and I wish you the best in your new digital home.
It doesn’t work in my current preferred browser. So that’s a big obstacle. I also hate the tabletisation of the internet, and this is a prime example, with infinite scrolling, popup form fill overlays, and bland colours, with a thousand icons and buttons everywhere.
A logical ramification of this train of thought is that no mortals should ever answer “I’m fine” when asked how they are doing since unless you’re a god doom ultimately awaits just around the corner.
Optimistic people are healthy.
TubaDiva said no infinite scrolling, but I’m seeing infinite scrolling everywhere instead of pagination, and nothing in user preferences that can turn off this satanic behavior.
The list of posts is ugly as heck, and I don’t know which threads I’ve participated in.
Using Markdown is really nice, though.
It takes a little amount of getting used to but I’m sure we’re smart enough to fight… this. 
Tuba never actually said no infinite scrolling. I checked what she said when people flat out asked if there would be infinite scrolling and she always danced around that question, but did not give an actual answer stating “No.” I took that to mean that we were being forced into infinite scroll. Which sucks and is the worst possible way to format a message board.
Sure, but the Tesla Dealer is going to be pissed off when you pay him with sacks of nickels. 
Can someone remind me why it was we had to switch the Board’s software to begin with? I mean, I get that we were getting timeouts and gateway errors with the old system, but was the cause of those errors ever determined to be specifically linked to the old vBulletin software? That is, was it verified that vBulletin was simply unable to deal with a message board of our size using the hardware available to us? Or was this more a question of the board administrators not being willing or able to track down the exact cause of the problem, and so moving to an externally hosted Discourse instance as the easiest option?
I doubt anyone who posts here actually knows how Discourse was selected. I’m pretty sure that Tubadiva didn’t get to make that call – rather, the board’s owners did. And probably someone in that group had heard good things about Discourse in some vaguely related context, and hoped it would help grow the board’s revenue.
In a different context, I’ve been told it’s more modern. A lot of that is features that the administration here is turning off, of course. But from 50,000 feet, thinking “how should I upgrade this board I own”, it probably looked good.
Maybe some enterprising creative soul with time on their hands can make a SDMB Theme that more closely resembles the old site, with specific colour choices or displaying features in familiar places, and submit that to be included in our options.