Ill give SD Dark a go. Dark was my first choice 6/22 but I see they have improved it since then. And I wont need the glasses to read it. 
Thank you!
Good Og, man, what century are you living in? Windows and Mac keep leapfrogging each other for UI silliness. Almost like some kind of weird competition. Even KDE and Gnome seem to jump into the mix. The aesthetic/practical difference between any of them is vanishing.
So I’ve logged in for the first time on PC. Since the switch, I was exclusively using my phone (and the standard Dark theme I thought was great on my phone).
And… I really like it on the PC too! Sure, the acres of blank space on both sides of the window is WEIRD, but it certainly doesn’t detract from my ability to read the content. The standard dark theme has mouseover preview, the relevant information I need is cleanly presented, and I love this live preview when typing a post. It works great on mobile, and is even better on PC.
So I will double down, and say I’m really happy with the switch to Discourse.
ETA: Have many of you had any performance issues? I saw that @puzzlegal did previously. Thus far, this has been super responsive for me, no issues at all, but I do have crazy fast internet speeds at home. It’s also been good on my phone away from the house though.
I’m liking this shiny new platform, partly because it has certain advantages, but mostly just because it’s fun to figure out new ways to do things. I agree with several other posters that this same poll in six months or so will skew even further toward Discourse.
Well, the cynic in me thinks that might be because all the people who don’t like Discourse will have left and won’t be around in a few months to take the poll.
One thing I hope is tracked is the number of active members. I hope that goes up from what we had before. I’m certain there is going to be member churn with the change (along with many other reasons), but hopefully the net effect is that the board becomes more engaging and more popular.
I voted “smoke signals” because Vbulletin does message boarding slightly better than Discourse, but the current site we’re on now has slightly fewer timeouts and such, so I can’t really say which I’d prefer given that we’re all on a learning curve and/or tweaking things still.
The platform is apparently xenForo.
The other message board I post to is DISboards.com, which apparently uses the same platform. I agree, it’s a nice interface.
With that said, I’m sure the admins of the board had good reasons for going with Discourse, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Hopefully all the issues get worked out.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would go with the old board using the old version of vBulletin, but that was clearly untenable with all the errors and problems we were having. I have no idea what the current version of vBulletin looks like, but again, I’m sure there was a good reason we didn’t go with it.
You’re still experiencing technical issues?
Occasionally the AJAX wheel will spin and spin and never return especially when loading more messages. When I reload the page all is then well.
FWIW, both DISBoards and MrExcel look very similar (which makes sense, since they both use the same platform). I wonder if we considered that platform for the SDMB.
I’ve been posting on DISBoards for over a decade now, and I’m pretty sure they originally used vBulletin. They switched to their current platform a few years ago.
One thing to note with Discourse is that the software is free, unlike XenForo or vBulletin. The SDMB is (optionally) paying Discourse for hosting and support, but not for the software or features.
I had that all day long the first day this was up. As I said elsewhere, it got better when I rebooted my home router. But other things I was doing on line were mostly fine. So I think this platform is more sensitive to flaky internet connections than some other (more so than vBulletin, which I was using for another site.).
That’s part of why I voted the way I did. My first impression of this forum was REALLY bad because it featured a lot of time watching a spinning disk over a frozen page.
The abrubt changeover gave many of us whiplash, for sure. But after finding a look I like (SD Dark), clicking around, asking a couple questions, and playing with the site’s features, it’s taken me all of 48 hours to get comfortable with the new site’s navigation. (And several of those hours were spent sleeping.)
I must say, I’m liking Discourse a lot. I’m getting around just as easily as I used to, and it’s a hell of a lot faster!
If anyone knows the solution to this one, please post it here. I know about hitting Ctrl-F twice to force the browser find function to open, but since the page doesn’t load all at once, it’s no help. I’m afraid to even post this question in any of the long help threads, for fear someone already posted it.
That’s XenForo, and it’s a mostly stock template with custom colors and header images. I’ve been saying XenForo would be the best path forward for the SDMB.
Even NodeBB, a kind of hybrid of the vBulletin/XenForo/Invision/etc and Discourse approaches, would have been a good match.
Agree with all of this. I’d gladly put up with the 504 errors to have the old board back.
I’m trying, really I am. But at this point I really dislike the new site. Not sure if I’ll be continuing, which makes me very sad. I’ve been a Doper of some kind or another for over 25 years. Even had a letter printed in the actual Straight Dope column.
But this new system seems, like many new gadgets, to be focused on its features. To me, this seems like form over substance. The old boards had a nice minimalism, and I think this allowed us to focus on what we thought and said. This feels too different to me. Maybe something has been lost.
Does nobody remember how much we used to complain about the old boards?
What stuns me is just how many of these “minimal features” people want added back.
Cards on the table, this new board is profoundly better than the old board.
Yeah it’s different but try using keyboard short cuts to navigate like g,t or g,u or g,n etc.
The speed you can get around this board compared to the old is a revelation. Plus no 502/504s.
But what will keep me here is the heart & soul of the message board … the posts and the community. The rest is frippery.
I’ll say that the desktop site is fair. The Simple Sam theme is a big improvement in that I can see the OP and last to post. Mouseover still doesn’t work with this theme but that’s not as important to me since I’m usually mobile
Ah, yes, mobile. We got off to a very bad start day 1 since it didn’t like my mobile browser (Opera). It’s doesn’t even try, just says nope. Ok, guess I’ll try Chrome. Browsing around, I could literally feel my phone getting hot in my hand. Discourse on mobile uses a shitload of data. I wish I had more control so I could stop the loading of images, previews, thumbnails, ads(WTF?!?!) and non-text things. I’m often on a dodgy 3g mobile connection and whatever is going on in the background data-wise really slows things down. The mobile themes are crummy. The current mobile experience will certainly make me participate less often.
Overall, I could do without the blingwads and iWhistles. So much clutter and so little utility. I’m pretty disappointed at how many migration problems that should have been easily anticipated during testing were left undone until after the switch. I’m pissed that I’m seeing ads and obviously I can’t continue to pay if they persist.
What stuns me is that people think of the old board as “minimal”. I loved the content, but I hated the visual presentation. Lots of ugly stuff, especially when I didn’t have an ad-blocker. And there were all sorts of widgety things on that page – I know, because sometimes they had trouble loading and I got broken widgets scattered around.
I do wonder what the experience of this new software is like with poor internet, though. Because when we first switched, I was having internet problems. My other boards were mostly okay, with intermittent issues, but this one was nearly unusable.
Since then I have been using it with both a phone (android: firefox and the discourse app) and on a laptop (mac: chrome) with fast wifi and it’s been pretty good. Different, sometimes confusing, but pretty solid once I found my way around. But so much of the modern internet seems to assume you always have a great connection… I don’t know whether that’s a good assumption, and I wonder at what point this software starts to hang due to flaky internet.