Mercy, schmercy. I say we burn it at midnight in a huge bonfire while we dance naked around it. Hooting and whooping, brandishing totems.
Will Discourse be free like the Straight Dope Message Board or will there be a nominal fee to join?
Tuba, thank you for everything you have done, are doing and will do to get this done. You are amazingly patient and helpful and wonderful.
I hope all the people who have been incessantly whining and moaning about the board performance are locked out for about six weeks while the rest of us enjoy a new and easier experience. Actually I don’t mean that. I really hope all of those people plus all the people whining and moaning about the new system that they haven’t even seen yet are blown away by the wonderfulness of the new system. I can’t wait to try it out.
Oh, people always moan and groan about change at first, and claim it will be a disaster, and then it amounts to nothing. Tuba, I’m really looking foreward to the results.
That was how long ago, though? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone pull a goatse in god knows how long. People said the same thing about avatars – I don’t think we’ve had any issues.
Perhaps a specific forum, on a trial basis could be done.
I’ve been on many many boards that allow pictures and not once have I run across goatse. Are Dopers total assholes compared to the rest of the internet?
Tuba Diva,
If you’re still reading, know that I genuinely appreciate all the work you people have done to make this change. I have owned a biggish forum and know the work you did.
I get tired thinking of it.
Thanks.
Well, that’s the crux, some poster’s email address won’t be valid anymore, so this strategy is somehow broken. But I agree that an email announcement to every user should be made.
Exciting news! Thanks to the staff for their hard work!
What about links to pictures on Tapatalk’s servers? Will they still work? Will Tapatalk delete them if they no longer support the SDMB? Will they be imported to Discourse?
This is good news 
I second all the heartfelt thanks to TubaDiva and all the staff that worked on this.
I expect a pretty busy ATMB for a while on the new site, as members get used to it, find the inevitable glitches, and inevitably bitch and moan about things that are different. My only real concern is that the board can continue with the existing management and moderation philosophy – things like the “Like” button are relatively harmless in and of themselves, but the Discourse idea that collecting a lot of “Likes” grants you privileged status is contrary to the SDMB’s basic culture. My understanding from an earlier post from TubaDiva is that we will not be using this feature in any way.
It has nothing to do with being reasonable. It has to do with posters who will not see your notification until the site is already live. Not everyone is going to come to the site before the changeover.
And what you can do is provide some way to allow people to still get their old accounts back if they miss the deadline. Because it is a guarantee it will happen.
And because, if you don’t, you will wind up with people signing up who will claim to be some old poster, and we won’t know if they’re lying or not. (And what will happen with the “no sock” rule if they do this?)
One idea I have is to keep the old user database around offline somewhere, and have them tell you their old email address, username, and password, and you can check it. I don’t know how practical that would be, but it’s something other than posters who don’t come around a lot winding up not being able to post or having to create a new account.
Did I understand correctly that the old URL will redirect to the new site? (Post #1 in the thread says “you’ll use the same URL for getting to the SDMB as now.”
If so, a sticky at the top of the new site page could be left there for at least some months, explaining the situation, and providing some way to contact a mod for those having email problems.
If not, then if it’s possible to leave a page up at this URL with the same explanation and a link to the Discourse site should work.
I’m also concerned about people who can’t get online right now, or who had other things going on in their lives with the result that they weren’t on the boards for some time.
PSA: [COLOR=“Black”][/COLOR]For those of you that are tempted to Google" Goatse"…
Don’t. Just don’t.
Yay. And I’ll just have to find a real cat to look at.
I’ll do you one better: I’ll explain what it is here, so you won’t stumble upon pics while looking it up.
It’s a pic of a guy holding his bumhole open very wide, taken straight on.
If you want more info after reading that, you can just read the Wikipedia page, which also has no pics.
This also goes for Tubgirl, who is not (I hope) to be confused with TubaDiva.
Yeah, we did. Someone decided to use deliberately disturbing images as avatars, and had to be ordered to desist. Fortunately there was only that one case.
I think you inadvertently stumbled onto the NASA site. Many people confuse galaxy NGC 5861 with a guy’s bumhole.
Very good news. Thank you to those who have been working on this migration. I’m not going to miss those 50X errors and the site’s languid performance.
Yeah!!