[li]When the whole page isn’t loaded, you can’t search for content in that page.[/li][/QUOTE]
I don’t know if discourse does this, but on some infinite scroll pages, there’s a ‘feature’ where as you scroll down, things that scroll off the top of the page are no longer loaded. I’m sure it’s for speed or memory or something, but that means you can’t just scroll way down to the bottom, then hit ctrl-f since you’ve lost the top part.
And just recently I ran into a site that disabled ctrl-f and instead produced it’s own search box when I hit that command. A search box which produced typical search results instead of just highlighting all the instances of the word I was looking for on the page I’m looking at.
I can’t think of any way in which that would be considered an upgrade. They took away a feature (ctrl-f) and in exchange are using more of their resources.
Question: why Discourse, and not a move to XenForo or IPB/Invision Power Board? Discourse seems like a bigger shift away from the traditional vBulletin/UBB format, there’s a steeper learning curve for maintenance, and if Discourse hosts it, it’s much more expensive.
That’s true in this case but not always. Discourse is like WordPress: You can install and host it where you like without paying anything to Discourse, or you can pay them to host an instance for you.
Silly Tibby! The SDMB has insurance for that from Floyd’s of London, Arkansas. They office out of the Dairy Queen. Of course the annual fee is a little higher to cover the premiums-- $1,000 per annum AIUI.
Discourse has its own search function. I played around with it a little and it seems to work pretty well. Then again, vBulletin’s search seems to work pretty well until it doesn’t. But, considering how wonky and broken our current search engine is, Discourse’s search engine is almost guaranteed to be a huge improvement.
On the test site, a long thread will have a scroll bar on the side. Things above and below where you are viewing are unloaded.
CTRL-F wouldn’t work on that type of page, so Discourse does as you’ve described. CTRL-F brings up a search box which gives you search results for all instances of whatever you are searching for in that thread.
I personally wouldn’t call it an upgrade or a downgrade. It’s just different.
People walk away from here for whatever reason & then may stumble back after some time. (I only know about the upgrade because someone send me a direct email.)
There should be a long-term sticky - “How to sign on again/update your info” with explicit instrux - ie. go to the top left/bottom right/dropdown menu* into the tab for user/contact/password reset to update your email to a current one.
Further, that message should have an email contact for those who are having problems signing on, whether it’s yours a more generic one like a gmail address (Dopep[del]dUp[/del]Mods@gmail.com???) that multiple mods can get into because you know you’re going to get a message 10 mins after you leave for an extended vacation. Not everyone uses FB or even knows about the page over there, & smoke signals don’t work if it’s too windy or blowing from the wrong direction. Instrux for how to signon to this site need to be accessible on this site.
I don’t know the layout over there, it may not be called “User CP” & hey, we have a lot of luddites on this board; can’t expect them to just know some of that new-fangled software.
Please let us know what the rules are for the password (minimum length, must contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and some “special characters”). Sometimes work-related sites don’t tell you that until after you’ve tried a new password only to have it rejected.
Off topic, but I really wish sites would remind you of the password rules when you’re trying to guess what your password is (like, after the first wrong guess).
If I know what I had to include in a password (how many characters and what types - numbers, special characters, uppercase), I can generally guess which password I used there, even if it’s been a year or two since the last time I’d logged in.
I think it’s safe to assume that the people who own and manage this board considered the expense and thought it fit within the budget. I think it’s also safe to assume that those who are responsible for maintaining it believe they will be able to continue to do so. Perhaps the technical staff has experience with Discourse?
Me too! And yes, thank you for all who are working to make this happen.
It would behoove all here to remember that any solution to a problem will bring needed improvements, yes, but it will also likely have some unintended negative consequences. We will have to adapt and learn to deal with it.
Passwords aren’t stored in plaintext in the database and it would also be a massive security vulnerability to ask users to give admins their password. But what you could do is keep a version of the vBulletin on a different URL with every thread locked/deleted except a single thread for “password reset requests”. This would allow someone to prove who they were by being able to login and post to that thread. The admins could then DM them with a new temporary password that they could use to login to the new server.
I strongly encourage the admins to do something like this as I imagine the number of people who are not going to update their credentials in time will be substantial.
This is the only bad news so far in this thread (aside from the whole problem where some users will inevitably not get the memo in time to update their email addresses, and y’all seem to be in denial about it.) Pretty much everyone hates infinite scroll[sup]*[/sup]. Sites like Facebook use it because they’ve learned that people are most likely to quit using Facebook and go back to doing something useful with their lives when they reach something that appears to be ‘the end’, and Facebook will happily implement a feature that their users hate and that makes them more unhappy in the long run if it increases engagement. There is no reason for us to make a similar mistake, though from some quick googling, it looks like the die is cast here. There is no setting in discourse to disable infinite scroll. I would be curious how the site works as a whole with javascript disabled, though. That might be a workaround.
[sup]*[/sup]I’m sure the usual suspects will be along to tell us how much more modern infinite scroll is compared to that old-fashioned pagination. Some people will assume newer is automatically better, and there’s little that can be done to help people like that.
It just won’t be the same without timeout errors. 
I’m looking forward to this. Thanks to everyone for their hard work.