That’s a very fair point, although I would argue that it applies mainly to UI-type issues and less so to optional features. Making the board look and feel (even in basic things like color scheme) like the old board is important, and makes people more comfortable. But extra, optional features–especially ones that take time to discover–don’t seem to cause problems in this regard.
vBulletin had no inline images, link previews, etc. I remember lots of whining that enabling pictures would just turn the SDMB into Facebook. Now we have the feature, and–well, it doesn’t seem to have turned into Facebook. In fact almost everyone uses the feature responsibly, and most posts are still text-only with the odd graphic here and there when it’s useful. My view is that it’s a big step forward in functionality and yet we’ve managed to preserve board culture. Maybe we should reevaluate in a year, but so far it’s looking good.
The Regular badge can be completely ignored by those that don’t care to use the features. And since it would only apply to a few dozen or a few hundred people, it should be easy to moderate said people (who would mostly self-moderate anyway).
It’s not that big a deal to me, but switching to new software and immediately flipping off all the switches kinda defeats the purpose of moving to a new platform.
Really? I’m very aware of the, was it two, threads closed automatically because of, IIUC, the number of flags. I’m not aware of any thread closed because of who flagged the thread.
But now I’m curious, how do you know that threads were closed because of who flagged them?
CMC
The loss of Jenny was particularly ill-timed. Once management gets their feet back under themselves I predict some interest in revisiting some of these change-avoidant move-in issues.
I moved a thread to The Game Room when the OP posted that they accidentally created it in the wrong Forum. That was before I read that we weren’t supposed to use our superpowers.
This seems to completely ignore the real reason why we changed software. We did not change software because we wanted spiffy new features. We changed software because we were trying to eliminate the constant database crashes and server issues from vBulletin grinding to a halt and tearing itself apart. When you are trying to keep the software as close as possible to what everyone is used to, flipping off all of the switches actually makes a lot of sense.
It makes sense that when we first moved to Discourse, things were set to replicate the vBulletin experience, but I expect that over time, we will slowly and gradually make changes to improve board functionality. Many times in the vBulletin days, people asked if this or that change was possible, only to be told no, because the software didn’t allow it.
For instance, one person wrote a script to allow for avatars but we had to run that script to see them. This board natively supports profile pictures. People wanted to include photos to explain something they were asking about, but that was disabled, but this board allows for them, if you just put the URL in a line by itself.
It’s worth noting that @codinghorror, who is one of the developers of Discourse, asked on the SDMB for comments and opinions about what new forum software should look like, back in 2012:
Yes. Put me down in the category of supporting turning some of those switches back on, eventually, when things are stable and there’s an administrator. At least on a test basis. But I think it was the right choice to start with an experience as close as possible to the old board.
