Okay, it is under “preferences”, then “interface.” Nothing with a decent text size, though.
Text size might help to start.
They probably don’t have a particular theme like that right now, but there are literally thousands that they can download and install. You can even make your own if you’re skilled at CSS and have Ruby-on-Rails installed (or know somebody that does).
“Enable Mailing List” mode seems to want to send a list of 100 new posts, so probably not the right option for me. I’ll wait and see if the settings I’ve picked are doing what I want. Thank you!
Hope it works!
It will take some time adjusting to the new environment for sure. 
Yay, I’m in.
That being said, yes, this is ugly.
It looks like the direct replies to you can be opened immediately beneath your post, but they will also appear chronologically in the main body of the thread. So you aren’t missing anything if you don’t click. Not sure if quotes work like, I’m about to find out…
I like how if you partly quote someone, the full text appears if you click on it.
What’s the deal with all the white space between posts? This looks to be the same software as they use for comments at TPM, but if you go to a thread there, you’ll see that there’s a hell of a lot less white space.
Is this something that can be fixed? Is it something where the view can be adjusted by each user? Here, it looks like each post is on a cloud of its own, rather than something meant to be read sequentially.
It is possible that different themes should should show different layouts.
I find the space between posts okay.
Links like RTFirefly posted are opening in the current tab/window instead of opening a new tab/window. That should prolly be changed.
It’s a setting in you Preferences- there is a check box to “open all external links in a new tab”.
I’ll take this over 504 errors any day of the week.
So much wasted space. Half of the entire screen is just blank white.
Going to take me a while to figure out the difference between ‘I don’t like this’ and ‘I’m not used to this.’
Possibly the wrong thread for it, but two things I like so far: I really like how the quote function works (though I haven’t tried to sort out replying to a long complicated post yet and don’t know how that’ll work.) And I like having the page automatically update itself – I usually open a batch of threads all at once and may take quite some time to get to all of them, including doing other things inbetween; and I used to keep forgetting to refresh the page before posting. No longer a problem.
The endless scroll’s not as bad as I was afraid it would be because of the date/time/post number feature on the sidebar; if I scroll around using that, I can find my way pretty well.
I don’t like the wasted space on the sides of the page, which no theme I’ve tried seems to get rid of. They need a large-monitor-desktop version.
I’m still getting stuff freezing, ending up in a non-functional page I can’t leave, and assorted other annoyances that are worse than the occasional 502 errors. My guess is my local wifi is glitchy today. But this site uniquely it’s going haywire. Not a happy puppy.
I was confused when I first landed here. I’m feeling pretty good now. And I’m sober.
Are you opening threads in new tabs on an older computer? Discourse takes a lot of clock cycles for every page you have open.
You mean, like a new tab for every thread? No. I only have one tab for the straight dope. I do have a lot of other tabs open in the browser.
I gather this is like Facebook? It’s a high maintenance thing that you can’t just leave open without it causing problems?
Yeah, I meant a new tab for every thread. Basically, all of Discourse is loaded into each of those tabs, so it can really drag down your performance. But that’s not what you’re doing, so I’m not sure what the problem could be.