According to the blurb, yes - you can log in with your facebook, twitter, yahoo etc. account, or create an account native to the forum.
Seems like the best of both worlds - if you don’t want it all joined up, you don’t have to. If you do want it joined up, or if perhaps you only want to post once, ever, you don’t have to create a new account.
People already have an optional ‘joined up’ model here, of sorts - you can populate details of your various other internet identities in your SDMB user profile.
From the other thread by codinghorror, Bold mine. This is actually something I started an ATMB thread about. It would be incredibly useful to know if someone quotes you in a reply. In the ATMB thread, there was a suggestion that Google alerts may be able to accomplish it, but testing showed that they can’t (yes,yes or that the people testing were doing it wrong)
Thanks! We try hard to focus on content (well, most of the time…)
My usual question when people start proposing changes to something well established is “Is this change just for the sake of change, or is it actually useful?”
Discussion of potential changes in a forum such as the Dope has to focus on utility if you want to keep great content (at least on average). Changing the window dressing to something trendy or flashy can take away from that. When someone points out that this forum has changed little since the 20th Century I feel a little pride - it obviously has something positive going to have lasted that long.
Then again, one of the major tools I use at work is a foot-powered 19th Century industrial sewing machine, so maybe I’m just hopelessly stuck in the past.
Yes, yes I’m one of those opposed to avatars here, but it’s not because of some avatar hate - I use them on every other board I’m on - but rather because I don’t see where they would add to content here. Likewise, a lot of other stuff proposed both by yourself and others I don’t see adding to content. The rather minimal bells and whistles here keeps the focus on content, which for here is a positive.
So Search your Username periodically. Daily, hourly if you like.
While I wouldn’t object to an automatic Ego Notification System, I wouldn’t be willing to trade our current visual or organizational structure for it. I’m not a Luddite. I’m not opposed to changing our board to something better. But so far I haven’t seen a “better” proposed that’s better enough to make up for the migraine I get just looking at the dang thing.
Remember, our board skews old. Positively ancient, in internet years. The majority of us are over 40, fer chrissakes! Our brains didn’t grow up wired with lots of graphic processing power. We like letters.
That’s missing the point. Nothing should have to be traded. People have mentioned several eminently useful features that the SDMB lacks; the present software clearly isn’t “the right solution” for all the ways people want to use the board. Requirements have changed, and will continue to change. The volume of ‘back catalog’ discussion here itself makes the lack of various kinds of robust searching an ever-increasing weakness.
Plenty of folks have already mentioned that that Discourse page is ugly. But nobody seems to have mentioned that it just plain doesn’t work. When I try to open any of the threads there, I just get a blank page that says “undefined”. And I don’t even have a back arrow available to return to the forum list. Now, granted, my browser isn’t the most up-to-date, but it’s not like I’m still using Mosaic or something, and it still works just fine, or with slightly reduced functionality, on the vast majority of pages on the Internet. Not working as well with older browsers is one thing, but not working at all with them is quite another.
That’s a valid challenge, but the process you’re directing it at is valid too.
Critical examination of the status quo, even if not provoked by any particular prevailing problem, can be a productive starting point for real, worthwhile innovation - we don’t have to wait until something is broken before fixing it up better.
Mousing over the user icons next to the thread just says “most recent”, etc, but not who the user is. Maybe this is by design, but it’s not very useful.
I tried this on their forum yesterday, just for laughs. I was not impressed.
See, I log into Disqus with my Twitter credentials. I don’t use Twitter for anything, really, so I don’t care. When I log into a Disqus comment thread with my Twitter info, Disqus takes me to the Twitter page where it asks if I want to authorize this app. I say yes, and it takes me back to the originating page. Disqus never sees my Twitter information.
That’s not how it works on Discourse (or else it’s just completely broken at the moment.) At Discourse, I told it to log in with Twitter, it took me to the Twitter page, asked if I wanted to authorize the app and then sent me back to Discourse - where it insisted I make a local account with my Twitter info. So unlike Discus, Discourse now know my Twitter password.
Also, the authentication procedure is borked. After making the local account, it tried to send me an authentication email, you know, like websites do, but when I tried to click the link it said that the account had either timed out or had authenticated already. But it’s not authenticated - it just doesn’t work. Now when I try to sign in it asks me to create a new account.
I’m sure the site was getting slammed yesterday so that might account forhte authentication woes but I’m not in any hurry to try again.
I don’t mean to sound like a Discourse apologist, but I’d give them a break because 1) they’re obviously way pre-release, and 2) they got featured on HackerNews yesterday, which means their pre-release site was getting pummeled to hell and back.
Smart move. That “sign in with twitter” experience sounds pretty broken. I wouldn’t trust it either.
Yeah, they were on Reddit, too. I’m sure their authentication server was smoking. I get that.
I’m not inclined to be merciful about the design issues though because this is the design they decided to debut to the world. If it’s not ready for public consumption, don’t put it out on the table.
If Linus took your advice, we’d never have Linux. Open source is a different world. “Release early, release often” and “Many eyes makes all bugs shallow” is the philosophy. Put a minimally functional release out there, get feedback, and iterate. This isn’t a Steve Jobs iThing unveiling and you shouldn’t expect a finished product. The code is on Github so if you’ve got some improvements, contribute.
We have existed in a very definitive Content over Form form since the beginning.
We’re not a squirming cabal of 12 year olds, clutching their pink rhinestone-encrusted cell phones while shopping at the mall, screaming over every wiggling cutesy-wootsey avatar and dancing icon.
:o :ralph: :o :yack!: :o :blowjob:, followed by :o :ralph: :o :yack!: (chicks don’t like to give blowjobs. Maybe the oral sperm injection explains that.) Oh well, I guess this [:o] is what we’re stuck with.
I’m missing a step here. How does Discourse know your password?
Let me see if I got it right:
You clicked on login with Twitter.
You were taken to the Twitter app authorization page and it asked you to authorize Discourse.
You clicked on Sign In and allowed authorization.
You were taken back to Discourse and asked to make a local account with your Twitter info already filled in.
Where and how does Discourse get your Twitter password? Twitter isn’t supposed to give out your password. It’s only supposed to share info, like who you follow, your name, and that sort of thing. I didn’t know there were any instances that Twitter would share your password with outside apps.
As far as people up in arms about the SDMB changing. I wouldn’t worry too much. Those guys got together and created a forum software that they like. They’re hoping lots of people use it. They explicitly said that they don’t expect current boards to switch over right away. And, as far as the UI complaints, if the software is as good as they claim I imagine it will be quite easy to customize it to look however you want it to look. Even if by some odd miracle a switch were made, I would hope it could be skinned to look very much like this place looks, with improvements in the back end.
Yeah, because that sounds a real optimal solution.
And that’s a remarkably charitable interpretation for the function of a tool that would facilitate conversations
Do the mental retardations you claim to suffer also cause you to infer a whole lot of things that simply aren’t there in my post? If you like letters so much, try reading them for comprehension. And then replying to what’s written, not what the sum total of your nightmares about ‘graphics’ causes you to impute.
The latest default design for vBulletin is really repulsively ugly, where they modernised it to such a degree it’s just a cluttered mess, bland and square, and most of the availableskins aren’t that much of an improvement.
We have a few really good Graphic Designers on this forum, some of whom I’m sure would be willing to voluntarily assist in a design upgrade for this site. I know I would, though I’m no great shakes in the design department really. We could keep the same version of the software but really spruce it up into something similar yet a marked improvement.
Me too. I don’t really give two shits about avatars, posting graphics, “liking” things or anything along those lines. All that stuff does is clutter up the forum and make it look like MySpace used to.
However, I’d love to have a much more full-featured searching capability here, and on most other forums I’m a part of. Ones where common abbreviations are not too short to be searched, or where you can combine keywords and other post metadata like AHunter3 suggests.
