If it ain’t broken, fix it until it is.
I’ve already called the internet police, they should be here any minute.
I apologize for using SDMB as an example, but as I said in http://www.discourse.org/faq/
And I had to pick a good forum to use as an example – SMDB is great content!
I have no complaints about how our forum looks.
I sure would love an industrial-strength boolean search engine for this place, though.
Please find all threads containing either posts by AHunter3 or containing the text string “Designated Optional Signature at Bottom of Post” in which “copying” appears in the same post as either “dialog” or “limit”, the words either “Macintosh” or “MacOS” and the word “Windows” appears in the thread, and either of the words “serious” or “kidding” or the phrase “for real” appears, before the year 2004, in one of the forums “General Questions” + “BBQ Pit” + “IMHO” + “Great Debates”.
nm
I could live with that but I like Xenforo much better.
I would like avatars. I would like being able to “like” posts, alerts when someone quotes me or tags me and so on. And it’s only $140 for a basic license. But there’s a cleanliness to the basic Xenforo functionality that’s not present in Discourse’s trial page. Maybe it’s just how they have the trial board set up and it can be adjusted better. I don’t know.
The current SD board is missing some functionality but Clean & Straightforward are still the most important features in web design and Discourse’s trial board doesn’t have it.
I agree on the aesthetics of the test forum over on discourse – it’s terrible – but I totally agree with their goal of making better forum software with richer features. Just having some simple metadata like “this post is a reply to this other post” is a big win in terms of being able to present and/or search posts. Hopefully as they progress, they can develop some themes that present the forum in a more no-nonsense way like we have here. I like my forum appearance a bit stoic, so the other people in the coffee shop think I’m studying or doing work. 
By the way, re:
One interesting thing they point out on one of their pages is that the entire user interface is built on their API, so in theory this isn’t a technical limitation. You could, for example, write an interface that eschews all that annoying dynamic loading crap and simply presents forums in the way the SDMB does, as manually-paged lists of “N most recent” posts. The fact that everything is doable through the API actually makes it much more accessible, not less.
As do I, for much the same reasons on the front end, and I understand it’s much more efficient at the back end. The SDMB has a particular problem with searches; the Xenforo board I use doesn’t.
Yes. AND the ability to search for strings of any length, even short ones. There are tons of cases where I need to search for a two-or-three-letter acronym and the software omits it. “Oh yeah, now I remember, it’s crippled” is not the best thing anyone’s ever thought about software.
I dunno if this has ever been discussed here before, but couldn’t we just have avatars and animated smilies?
I would love to see what the new makeover of the dope will be like. Oh and Colibri, maybe you could reconsider going to the warnings and infractions system me and Little Memo were talking about, with the new forum software.
New makeover? Did I miss an official announcement or something?
Let’s take a vote:
In Favor: 2
Opposed: The entire internet
To the best of my knowledge there is no “makeover” scheduled at the present time. This is all speculative and theoretical and should not be taken as anything more than speculation unless and until you see an actual announcement from management on the subject.
Short of codinghorror himself volunteering to port over the entire database to Discourse on his own time and dime (or anyone else volunteering to port over everything to another system), the SDMB software ain’t gonna change.
I don’t wanna know the frankenbuild the SDMB currently is. And I think most Dopers don’t understand just how much money it would cost to change the system. Unless we can get Rand Rover to dedicate half a year’s salary to the cause 
Yeah, it’s even a little bit Fark-y.
Some of the design goals are quite laudable though (if not necessarily novel in all contexts) - log in with existing credentials, users-become-moderators based on reputation (although that could snowball in the wrong direction).
Not all forums exist for the same purposes, however. I don’t see a lot of the features of Discourse being very relevant here, for example, if for no other reason than not every organisation is necessarily actively seeking to add every possible bell and whistle, or any.
But choice is great, so it’s a great thing that Discourse is there, and available for people to choose. Market forces and all that - let’s see what comes out on top.
Why do you fear Discourse?
When did you take up amateur psychology?
I assume by “log in with existing credentials” you mean something like “logging in to Facebook logs you into the SDMB”? And would that be optional–could people still create separate accounts for each of the different Internet communities they participate in?
'Cause personally I don’t want everything I do on the Internet linked to everything else I do on the Internet.
When did you stop?