I still participate in several vBulletin-based message boards and I like them better.
It’s a shame that the folks maintaining the code didn’t fix whatever caused the performance bugs that made it incapable of handing SDMB.
I can think of several. IIRC, on the main pages of each forum, the thread listings included the handle of the thread’s creator, the date it was created, and an icon that indicated that you had posted to it. I still miss this last feature, in particular. My workaround is to bookmark threads in which I have made more than a simple drive-by posting, but I preferred vBulletin’s way of listing threads.
Also, there is a lot more unnecessary (IMHO) white space in all of Discourse’s various interfaces, meaning you have to do a lot more scrolling than you did with vB.
But overall Discourse’s stability has made these relatively minor annoyances worth it, and I got used to the new software pretty quickly and easily.
That’s absolutely something you can do here. You can set it up so it automatically subscribes you to each thread you post to or just manually subscribe to them (on a non-mobile device anyway) by clicking the little bell icon to the right of the posts and picking one of the options.
Sorry, I have set preferences so that I’m automatically subscribed to threads I post in, but I don’t see any icons on the listings of threads that indicate I posted to them, unless I manually bookmark them. Is this unique to certain interfaces? I don’t see it in Sam’s Simple.
I now have two bookmarks for the SDMB - that one and the standard board. I check the posted link first for ongoing conversations, then move to the second to browse more generally. Very handy.
I’m another one that found this software a little off-putting at first, but have adapted to it to the point where I know longer miss the old board with it’s raft of bugs even a little bit. This one is not perfect (the archive did take a little shellacking for sure), but it runs pretty smoothly for me. Unlike Chronos’ experience I never really find it slow, though perhaps that is down to me mostly browsing on modern desktops.
I might’ve preferred something else, but I don’t hate it at all. It’s fine.
Improvements:
- It doesn’t crash several times per day. vBulletin got to the point where it was rare that we didn’t reboot it at least a couple of times each day, and even when it worked it was so laggy that a lot of folks gave up on it.
- Discourse is actively maintained. This means that bugs can get fixed. The version of vBulletin that we had was no longer maintained. We just had to live with the bugs that were in it. Our attempts at upgrading to a newer version of vBulletin failed miserably, so we were stuck with our old, crappy, unsupported version.
- The search function actually works and doesn’t just hang for no reason on particular words.
- Infinite scrolling makes navigating around threads easier.
- Lots of different themes to choose from.
- More smileys.
- You get better notifications for things like when someone posts in one of your threads. You can also @ people to notify them of something. For example, @Stoid will send you a notification that I have mentioned your name in a post.
Neither better nor worse:
- Discourse has forums and threads, though it calls them categories and topics. After a small period of adjustment, you can easily read forums and threads pretty much as you did with vBulletin. Things are laid out a bit differently, but no functionality was lost.
- You can put polls anywhere, even inside existing threads.
Worse:
- Infinite scrolling makes navigating around threads much more difficult (yes, I put this under the improvements section too - some people think it’s great and it’s an improvement, other people hate it with a passion)
- More smileys (again, better or worse, depending on your opinion of smileys).
- Discourse can’t handle spaces and many other characters in user names. Basically, if it can’t go in a URL, Discourse can’t use it. vBulletin used a much better system of tracking things by number, so URLs didn’t matter.
- Text formatting is more limited. We have the MathJax plugin installed which allows you to do a lot of formatting. It’s designed for math but you can use it for non-math things like making colored text.
- Discourse won’t let you copy the entire text of a post in a reply if the reply directly follows the post. Since intentionally copying the text is usually done for clarification of what you are responding to, more often than not this causes more problems than it fixes. One way to trick Discourse is to leave off the last period of the sentence you are quoting. Then it isn’t the entire post.
- Discourse is a bit naggy about things like post length and posts that are similar to other posts. Sometimes what it thinks is a “similar” post is a bit comical.
In the grand scheme of things, just the fact that Discourse doesn’t crash constantly or slow down like a snail on sedatives kinda trumps everything else. vBulletin got to the point of being unusable. The move to Discourse wasn’t an attempt to get better software. It was an attempt to get WORKING software. All of the other stuff is minor.
I’d add the embedding of linked pictures and videos as ‘better’. I know people considered the sparse, text-only features of the old vB implementation a feature and not a limitation, but for a board that is themed significantly about explaining stuff, it was always absurd not to be able to embed pictures.
I had a little difficulty adjusting at first but now I can’t really even picture the old board. This new site is the SDMB to me. Lots of improvements that i appreciate.
I would still prefer an old style board, minus the crashes. There are several stable board types that would still have the feel of the old SMDB.
I have minor quibbles with Discourse. I don’t like the way it uses common symbols to automatically format weirdly, I don’t like the nagging, I don’t like the date timestamps, I don’t like the way it obscures who you’re replying to unless you trick it into doing so, and I don’t like things like the minimum character limit.
The only serious problem with Discourse though is the lack of pagination. It’s codinghorror’s pet cause to remove pagination from the internet, but it’s so much better and more user friendly than infinite scroll.
Thanks, I know about that, too, but it’s not what I’m talking about. vB would automatically indicate, on the main page and on each of the forum pages, which of all the threads displayed you had posted to. I can manually accomplish about the same thing in Discourse if I remember to bookmark a thread, but I liked the way vB did it.
And there’s the other things I mentioned: seeing on those lists who started each thread and when. AFAIK, Discourse can’t, or at least isn’t, doing that now.
FlyerTalk has infinite scrolling implemented in vB and it is HORRIBLE. If I open a thread, select 1st unread and then scroll back a post or two to refresh my memory it will jump back 2 or 3 pages of messages. The quoting also sucks, so if someone quotes a message with 4 or 5 full size images, they are repeated and clutter up with the screen.
Discourse is light years ahead in my opinion.
Agreed. Light years ahead.
@commasense
Here’s a shot of what I see when I’m looking at a list of topics. You can see a “25” next to the Amber Heard Thread a and “1” next to the Martin Hyde thread. That’s showing the number of new posts to a thread I’m subscribed to (automatically, due to posting to it) since the last time I viewed it. If I click on the thread, however, the number will be gone until there’s more posts. Also, the icon at the top/right will display notifications when threads I’m subscribed to have new posts.
ETA, in addition to the number of notifications appearing next to the icon, if I’m viewing something in another tab, the SDMB tab will also show the number.
Yes, but vB showed an icon whether there were new posts or not.
I like it so much, I set my Kindle to infinite scroll. But I can understand that it’s not for everyone.
I use my computer, my phone and my table to look at the Dope. Doesn’t matter which device I use, the Dope knows where I was. While I’m not fond of some of the excessive white space (while I currently see what I’m typing and how it will show up, which I find very convenient), I really like the reliability. This is worth it.
Under the heading of “irritating format changes” I remember being ticked off a couple of years ago when Sports Illustrated radically overhauled its website. Now I can’t recall what they did that was so annoying.
True, I don’t go there much anymore, but that’s because so many of their articles are behind a paywall.
I can’t picture that. In vB, I was set up to subscribe to every thread I posted to (plus I could manually subscribe to threads as well) and then I’d regularly click the User CP button to show me all the posts I was subscribed to, with ones that had new posts being at the top of the list.
I don’t recall any indication while looking at a list of threads, be it a list of threads within a forum, a “New Posts” list or a search. I regularly refreshed the User CP page to watch for new activity in threads I had posted to.
There are quite a few different notification settings and I’ve never really looked into how all of them work once I got things set up in a way that I like, so it may be possible to find a way to get them to behave in a way that works for you.
The first is just Markdown, which is an extremely common modern text solution. And I like that they also added the others so people more used to those could use them. vBulletin also combined two of those: HTML and bbCode–we just turned HTML off on our board.
Making it harder to write out M*A*S*H just isn’t that big a deal. It’s a singular exception, and one that is really unnecessary to write out 99 times out of 100. Even style guides say not to style the text of works like that. Just call it MASH. It’s still easier in all the other cases to just type a single * to get italics than to have to type [i] or <i>, to the point that I rarely use the actual button.
I also like having the post times tell me relative to the present, as it saves me having to do the math myself. Surely with recent posts, what is more important is how long ago it was posted. The only mod I made to the dates is that I always show the year if it’s not the current year, to avoid confusion where I see a post that is from, say, July 5, and don’t realize that’s a year old.
And I also don’t know what you mean about the site being slow. Sure, it takes a bit to load the first time (which is something they should fix) as it has to download the whole app to your computer. But, after that, it’s a lot faster than waiting on each page to load back on vBulletin. And everything updates in real time.
I do get the complaints about the more periphery aspects of the board. I just never used them, so it’s never been a big deal to me. And I do wish that it was more backwards compatible, and that it wasn’t so opinionated. I hate that it deletes quotes without even adding a marker to show who you replied to. I hate that it apparently takes you mods more work to do certain things, and how many workarounds had to be implemented due to silly features. And it’s annoying how much more work I had to put in to tweak things around here, due to their use of the Ember JavaScript library.