How many of us here have actually signed up on that Demo site, or otherwise have experience with Discourse?
Anyone who hasn’t, I really recommend you should do so and play around there for a while. (Oops, am I breaking the rule about “advocacy” here?) It will be helpful to have at least a little familiarity with the workings there before we go live there.
I’ve done that yesterday and the day before. In that time, I’ve encountered two other Dopers there, and had some extensive conversation with one of them there. I probably won’t go there again until the Big Day, because I feel I’ve learned at least enough to hit the ground running when we get there.
Be aware that the Demo site consists of a few Categories (Forums), and few topics (threads), and a few posts from several years ago, plus whatever new stuff people post there, but that new stuff gets erased every day. It seems they just made a static back-up of their Demo site some years ago, and every day they just do a full restore to the way it was then. To play with the demo over several days, you’ll need to sign up afresh each day (which is fairly quick and easy, but you’ll need to check your e-mail and click on a confirmation link).
The existing threads there include one Category full of threads with information about how to use their site. For those not already familiar, it will be valuable to read at least that.
There is also one thread with a beautiful (but perhaps not terribly realistic) photo of a lake surrounded by mountains, which I’ve stolen and set as my desktop background!
ETA: When you sign up, you will be greeted by a bot that, at your option, will walk you through a tutorial of some of the basic operations on their board. It goes fairly quickly. If you’re new to Discourse, I recommend it. You’ll even earn a few silly “badges” by the time you finish it! :rolleyes:
I think I’ll just wait till the board opens over there and only have to sign up once.
I’ll be heading into my first farmers’ market of the year and won’t have much time to deal with things anyway; if I can get in and make that first post, I’ll try studying the place some over the weekend and/or when it gets around to raining again.
Yay! I hope it all goes smoothly. I’m sure a lot of people will run into issues due to not remembering (or having access to) their old email, but there’s not a great way to prevent that.
(And I only just found this note, even though I thought I’d checked for updates a couple days ago. I guarantee lots of regular readers will miss it.)]
This. I have seen occasional issues with inappropriate images, but that’s what moderators are for.
Yeah, I played around with Discourse when someone was thinking of porting a different board I post on, and I found it extremely disorienting. I never knew where I was, of how to find stuff.
I suppose we will all learn how to use it.
I’m pretty sure the admin can adjust that setting. That WASN’T a problem that I noticed.
Notwithstanding all the minor grousing that I and a few others are doing in this and the other thread, I’m really all looking forward to getting this change done.
This board is being REALLY recalcitrant today. Possibly about the worst I’ve ever seen it. I think it, like Trump, is going very visibly downhill very fast! (cf: the Clusterfuck thread where they’re talking about his speech at West Point.) I fear this board may not survive another week.
I hope the admins here are making full back-ups EVERY DAY, if not every hour, because this board is going to totally crash any fucking minute now, and if you don’t have a really up-to-date back-up, the whole board is going to be lost forever.
You know, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle clicking on “post” and just having a post go through with no fuss, muss, or bother. :dubious: Where’s the excitement, the suspense, the pre-emptive copying of the post so it won’t get lost, the click, the suspenseful wait… round and round she goes and where she stops nobody knows! … and then YES! JACKPOT! The post went through!
Or…
But no, it’s taking too long… will it be a 504 or a 502?? I open a couple of other windows because I can’t take the tension… Oh, damn, it’s a 504!! Crap. But I go to UserCP in a new window and check my recent posts and it’s there! HA! *You little debbil! *
Every post is a thrill-a-minute spin of the wheel.
If shit starts working like it 'pposed to, then hell, it’s like putting your money in the slot machine, pulling the handle, and (yawn) getting a shower of coins every single dad-blamed time. Where’s the sport in that, I *aks *you??
Yeah, where’s the sport. Posting here will just become a routine, predictable task. Like being at work or something. Sigh.
Unless admin change something, here’s how post editing works on Discourse.
Post something. Notice a whoops and edit it. You have some time–roughly 5 minutes–to edit without an editing notice. After that time, you can still edit, but a yellow pencil appears that anybody can click on to see the edit history.
Assuming those values hold
Edits within 5 minutes–no notice, no yellow pencil, posters can’t see the original, neither can mods, admin can.
After 5 minutes–notice displayed, yellow pencil displayed, everybody can see the edit history.
ETA: Looks like the editing notice has been removed from some boards, at least.
Oooh, I like having free edits but a visible edit history! That’s the best of both worlds. I can fix a typo, but if the next posts are confusing as a result, anyone can look to see what inspired them.
I am cautiously optimistic. I will miss the scripts I have been using to augment my user experience (I assume they won’t work over there) but those are minor negatives outweighed by the potential positives.
From what I’ve read on the demo site, it’s worse (better!) than that. The server saves a copy of your reply, so you can go search for stuff, read other posts and even log in from another computer and your reply will still be there. If you navigate away, it’s supposed to ask if you want to post it where it was originally, but it’s not supposed to disappear.
If it works like it says on the demo site, that will be a huge improvement. No more copying in case something else is clicked by mistake. We’ll see if it really works like that, but wow!
[I’m quoting it in case the demo version disappears]
Oh, man, that’s gonna hork a lot of old threads. Like this one.
I ran across that at, of all places, work. Using a handheld, someone explaining how to do something said something about a hamburger. They had to show me what they meant. I don’t think of a hamburger when I see the three bars (or even three dots on some interfaces), but whatever.
