So, Jeff Atwood, the guy who founded StackOverflow with Joel Spolsky, has released a shiny new replacement for the veritable and dusty VBulletin and phpBB forum software.
So, I clicked the link, headed to the “about” page, and what do I find but our own message board, in a pair of screenshots from 2000 and today, with the caption “Is there any other form of communication on the web that looks nearly identical, 13 years later?”.
Frankly, far from embarrassing, I find that something to be proud of. When you hit on the right solution, and the requirements don’t change, why “fix” it? But hey, Jeff has predicted my skepticism, and countered it:
So what say the Dopers? Is there any compelling reason to upgrade now? Do you think this particular software offers any benefits over the crufty VBulletin we currently use? Any other thoughts or input?
Go to the “Try It” tab on tha site in the OP.
I’ve never seen a more fugly forum. If that’s what they think works well they can keep their dirty mitts off the SDMB.
Agreed. I don’t like all the gamification and icons and such. Still, it has some interesting features I’d like to see available a la carte. Being open source and free, I’d like to think a million themes will be available soon after this software releases.
The best part is where BigT reads him the riot act for not understanding how this board works and he bets he won’t come back because he doesn’t understand how this board works…and he doesn’t ever come back!
Seconded. I think the hysterics around here every time some innocuous change like avatars or even just Google crawling FFS come up are absolutely ridiculous, but that example site makes me want to hurl.
Interesting-on his “about” page the second picture isn’t a screenshot of the board as it is today, it is actually a direct link to the board. Is he allowed to use a link to the SDMB to promote his project?
Speaking just as a longtime poster, I see no reason to change, and frankly the dude’s test forum looks ugly as hell and has no feature this one doesn’t except for ugly little avatars. It looks like The SDMB For Small Children.
While I have no doubt that there are features in the new software that would make life easier on the SDMB, I wouldn’t trade this format for anything else. It’s one of the reasons I still post here. I know what to expect, I don’t have to continually check to see what has changed, and for the most part, things act the way we expect them to.
if the software is free, I can see it getting some takers. But if this board ever goes down that road, PLEASE keep avatars away from us. We like our look and feel, even if it is considered primitive.
I don’t think it looks bad, but I see problems with the Ajax implementation. It could make the board more difficult to search if the only way to access older threads is to scroll and wait for more topic/thread titles to load.
I am still not convinced there is any sort of problem with the SDMB, other than from the crowd that don’t read novels because there are “not enough pictures.”
