It took one second to do it.
I am currently reading the board from a 2011-vintage iPad which can’t read Reddit, Quora or most online newspapers. I am having zero issues with Discourse. Just as a data point 
Well, that’s encouraging.
Just went to another board which still has vBulletin.
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I’m happy with the new Dope.
Same. It’s too bad a “certain other forum” couldn’t handle a transition to Discourse back in the day.
I like the new site. 
I think people will soon get used to it, and it will become the new normal.
Things have been a little difficult because we have such a large number of members who were using the old board frequently for years, but the newness will pass.
We needed to move into the 21st century. Many people access the board on mobile phones and tablets now, and the old board simply wasn’t adequate.
Teething problems have mostly been sorted out, thanks to the hard work of @TubaDiva and others, and the great tech support at Discourse.
The board now looks like it will be great for the foreseeable future.
Personally, I would have gone with a newer conventional flat forum system, like XenForo, Invision Power Boards, or even a Discourse/vBulletin-style hybrid like NodeBB.
Still, I get the powers that be credit for taking a risk with a message board system that is radically different from good 'ol vBulletin 3 and the alternatives. The learning curve for vBulletin > Discourse is probably much steeper for SDMB staff than what they’d encounter if they went with a more typical vBulletin > XenForo more. I really think staff is doing a GREAT job given the circumstances. Seriously. Tweaks don’t take months or years to happen. New themes are up quickly. I’m impressed. 
I hope this leads to a shift in one aspect of SDMB culture I always found annoying – the idea that change is bad. Knee-jerk NIMBY and a “freeze it in amber” mindset among long-time residents don’t make cities better places to live. The same thing applies to virtual communities.
The big thing for me is still the huge amount of wasted space on my screen, which means I have to do a lot more scrolling than I used to to see a handful of posts.
And the scrolling is weird: if you use the regular scrollbar to scroll down a few posts (or what you’d think would be a few posts) you find yourself thirty to fifty feral hogs posts down the thread, and because of the lack of pagination, it’s harder to figure out where the hell you were before you blew it with the scrolling.
Sure, lots of bells and whistles that I’m sure are cool, but the basic thing is READING, and it was way easier on the old board, even in its last days.
I always use my mouse wheel, so scrolling is not an issue.
You can also use PageUp and PageDown to scroll one page at a time, and the J and K keys to scroll one post at a time.
I’m happy with the new place and I’m really happy to see some dopers here that we hadn’t seen for awhile.
I don’t use my mouse wheel unless I absolutely have to - my index finger gets sore quickly from the little grippy things on the wheel.
I never use the page up and page down keys, because I’m used to being able to do all that with the mouse, which is where my hand is anyway while I’m reading. But I guess my hand will have to learn where those keys are. (Yes, I know where they are; my hand doesn’t, if you know what I mean. I can’t just reach for them automatically.)
But I can’t help but feel this is retrograde, going back to remembering a bunch of different keyboard shortcuts. We had left that behind when we left the DOS era, and I was good with that.)
Sounds like you need to get a better mouse! 
Decent ones have a smooth scroll wheel.
Hard disagree. A good mouse’s scroll wheel is grooved for better grip. It shouldn’t make your finger sore, for sure.
Also, just wanted to add about the keyboard shortcut thing: it may feel like a throwback to the DOS days, but that’s not actually true. After GUIs became ubiquitous, there was a serious push to do everything through the GUI. Average users - and I don’t mean that pejoratively at all: there are many software packages where I’m an average user - still do. It’s easier to discover and remember how to do something with a well-designed GUI. But it takes longer, and can be quite tedious for actions you take all the time! So it wasn’t long before software designers began adding keyboard shortcuts for (nearly) everything, and power users adopted them. This has been going on for decades. I think it’s really starting to become more visible, now, as younger folks are more likely to be power users, so a higher percentage of the user base is power users relative to average users, and therefore software designers spend more time on those methods of accessing features, and doing things through the GUI becomes more cumbersome than before.
That’s what you’re noticing now. The scrollbar doesn’t work the way you’d expect it to (because of infinite scroll), and the software designers don’t care because they’ve built the keyboard shortcuts that they think operate well enough. Anyway, I don’t think that’s going to get better, at least in the immediate term, so I’d recommend learning a few shortcuts. j/k are great on this site, and when I’m reading through a thread, I don’t have to take my fingers off them, except for the rare post that is longer than a single browser screen. Then I reach over to my mouse, scroll a couple times, and resume using j/k.
Really? You think so? To me, it looks like there is less wasted space. Vertically, at least. Unless you want to count the fact that a given post will take up more vertical space because of the narrower column view. Which bothers me the opposite of at all, because narrower text columns tend to be easier to read.
It’s like the difference between reading a hardback and reading a paperback. I’ve never noticed any problems.
The space bar works as page down. Shift-space bar pages up.
That’s something your browser does rather than something that Discourse does. It varies by browser.
There are browsers that don’t do this? I thought it was standard behavior at this point.
Well, if you are just using a tablet, there is no space bar handy. Unless you have a keyboard connected, which kind of defeats the purpose much of the time.