What were people thinking during the transition to Discourse?

About This Message Board
1

I’m interested partly as an amateur anthropologist and partly as a software craftsman who is about to initiate almost identical transition, taking a different discussion platform from a creaking older platform to a shinier, faster platform and I want to avoid some of the stress (for me and all my members).

I’ve been through several transitions like this and the same things happen every time. I want to understand what people were thinking at the time (if you can remember).

This transition went much better than most I have seen thanks to the hard work of TubaDiva (God rest her soul) but still the same things happen.

On the first day, there are a few problems. The mods and devs work like crazy to fix them. Everybody complains. So far so normal.

But then a weird kind of groupthink starts. I think there are several groups.

  1. There are the people who are angry that a button moved or changed colour.
  2. There are people who are angry that something works a little differently than it did before.
  3. There are people who are so hopelessly lost that they despair of things ever getting back to normal.
  4. There are people who just quietly get on with learning how to navigate the changes or share their excitement as they discover new features.

I totally understand the people in groups 1 & 2. I get mad when the grocery store moves my crumpet from aisle 3 to aisle 4 and I can’t find them.

I’m usually in group 4 and I think I understand our group.

I’m interested to know what is going on the head of the people in group 3 during a transition like this. I’m not going to name names, but there were quite a few who were so angry it seemed like they would quit at any moment. Some perceived any attempt to help them as an attempt to shame them and any additional suggestion just seem to add to the cloud of confusion they were in.

From the first hour of the transition, it was obvious (to me at least) that Discourse was going to be much better than what we had before and that any problems would be fixed and that any difficulties would pass within days (or weeks at most) and that, eventually, most people would agree that the new system is better than the old system. And, sure enough, that’s what happened.

If you are in the group that found the transition difficult, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are you able to look back and ask “Why did I find it so difficult?” or do you still find it difficult now?

I’ll share my theory in a separate post but I’d love to hear yours!

2

My theory is related to the Satir Change Model.

http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change/

This model is big in management theory but it originally came from family therapy. The idea is that people expect a change to make things better. And they do eventually (usually)…

…but it usually gets worse before it gets better.

People get angry about the change and give up in anger before they get a chance to experience the new status quo. I expect some people have a memory of several similar episodes where a change made things worse and and come to reject all change as destructive.

Does this resonate with anyone — especially with anyone who found the transition especially distressing?

Do you have any thoughts on what could have better prepared you for the change so that you would have found it less distressing?

The conversation platform that I manage is full of older people who are mostly very ill with cancer or other serious diseases. I’m very keen to make the transition as unstressful as I can and would love your help and advice to achieve that.

3

I see you don’t have a group for

  • People who understand that the combination of hardware and software the boards were running on was clearly broken and had to be replaced, and have generally adapted to and accepted the new board software BUT don’t actually think that the new software interface is really any better than the old software interface was, and in fact think the various changes range from “different but no better” to “actually, this is worse”.

Not really, no. The “new system is better than the old system” in the sense that the old system was broken and the new system is not. If you compare “vBulletin running on hardware that’s old and no longer works and therefore constantly throws out error messages and is basically close to unusuable” to “Discourse running on shiny new hardware that doesn’t constantly crash” then Discourse wins. If you compare “vBulletin running on properly functioning hardware” to “Discourse running on properly functioning hardware” then, no, Discourse is really no improvement, and is maybe even worse in various ways.

Now of course I realize that the option “vBulletin running on properly functioning hardware” was for various reasons not actually an option, and therefore I would choose “Discourse running on properly functioning hardware”.

But other than the not-crashing (“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”) I don’t think there’s a single feature of Discourse that I’ve actually thought “Gee, that’s better than vBulletin ever was, even back when vBulletin was working properly!” At best, it’s just different. All too often, it’s still kind of worse.

The preview pane, I think, is potentially better than having to hit “preview” and see the post–I mean, even better than back in the days when that wasn’t an invitation for an error message–except that it turns out the preview page isn’t even always WYSIWYG, which is a pretty appalling “feature” for a preview function.

4

This is the group that I am in.

5

Same here. Besides the fact that it actually is more reliable, everything else about it is worse.

6

Interesting that the first three to reply are in the group that I missed.

7

Keep in mind that the people who are still around are the people who are still around. The people who left during the switch aren’t around to say how much they don’t like the new format. So although we might be able to say that most active members are okay with Discourse, we can’t say that most of the active SDMB members pre-Discourse are okay with Discourse.

8

Can TSDPTB determine with any accuracy how many people walked away after the switchover to Discourse and haven’t come back?

9

I’m skeptical about this. I think the objections were a little more thought out.

10

There’s a book called Who Moved My Cheese, which discusses this. It’s more of a self-help book, so it’s aimed more towards helping someone accept change in their own life rather than ways that the cheese-mover can move the cheese so the mice don’t get mad.

But along those lines, it is frustrating when things change. Even if there’s a more efficient or enjoyable way, it may not necessarily be more efficient or enjoyable to you. That’s especially true if you get in the habit of doing things a certain way. Once you know the steps, the inefficiencies aren’t necessarily problematic. We have to deal with this stuff all the time in the workplace as new processes and procedures are rolled out. We all make the effort to learn the new way because our job depends on it. But when something we do for fun or relaxation changes, we may not feel as compelled to take on the effort to switch over.

I’ve been on forums that switched to a new layout and I generally lost interest over time. Often, I can’t pinpoint exactly why I didn’t find it as interesting, but I find I go there less and less and then almost forget about the old board.

11

I didn’t mean to be dismissive. I was trying to capture a distinction between

  1. A function is essentially the same but the UI changed.
  2. A function is missing.

I think there were a lot of people who got frustrated because a button that used to be in once place was now hidden in a menu, for example.

Like I said, I can understand and sympathise with people who were upset by not being able to find something.

12

I was in group 4, and really couldn’t/can’t wrap my head around getting angry or despairing about changes in something as simple as a message board. Absolutely nothing about this has been difficult in any way; sure there have been a couple of occasions where I’ve thought “so how do I do X in the new software?” and every time a tiny bit of poking around has solved my question, without even having to Google it. For the most part, if anyone has used any mobile phone or web apps/websites in the past decade, most everything here should be pretty familiar to them- the 3 line icon, the avatar thing, and so on is all straight-up modern day mobile/web design stuff that we see everywhere.

I’m pretty much sure that people who got wound up about this are probably busy printing their emails to read them, or worrying about kids on their lawns or whatever.

I was mostly excited about the prospect of better up-time, more modern features and so on, and figured that whatever changes there would be, were ones likely to true the board up with the 21st century, not weird or bizarre ones.

13

If it rains, you’d better scurry inside. Your nose is so up in the air you’ll drown.

14

Maybe the admins can, but at the moderation level we can’t determine that number with any accuracy.

If you look at post counts though, there was a huge flurry of posts just after the move (probably complaints, need help posts, etc), but after those died down, posting levels were approximately what they were before the move, and have been slowly rising since.

Based on that, I think it’s a fair bet to say that out of the people who post here, the percentage that walked away is small enough to be statistically down in the noise.

15

Moderator Warning

Do not insult others outside of the Pit. This is an official warning.

16

I was sorta in group 3 for a bit. But it wasn’t because of the small changes. It was because we 100% needed a lot of changes to vanilla Discourse to make it even remotely usable for us, and none of them were in place when we got here. I got that it might not be finished, but none of the big issues seemed to have been addressed.

It was a bit of a perfect storm situation. Discourse has a lot of features that are problematic–ones that are basically the reason anyone chooses Discourse. We were told vaguely that some things would be fixed, but few details. People made assumptions about what would be fixed, but then a poster with knowledge of Discourse challenged that those fixes could be made, with no response from anyone in the know that they were wrong. (And I admit was just a bit miffed that our recommendation of “anything but Discourse” was ignored without explanation of why. Best guess–Discourse was cheaper or could handle our large database better. Otherwise, why choose the one forum software that would need so many fixes to work?)

So, when I got here and so little seemed to have been done, feared the worst. I did not at all expect that the changes that had not been enacted in the weeks before we moved would be implemented within days.

After the changes, I was mostly in group 4, since I can generally figure out any software features if they’re there to figure out. But also partly in the unofficial group 5, as I agree that there is little that Discord actually does better, and a lot it does worse, even with the fixes.

Flagging hiding posts wasn’t as bad as I had thought, since you could just click to unhide them. I do wish the “hidden” notice stood out a bit more, but it’s generally fine. No, the bad one is the autoclosing of threads. The site is much heavier on the browser. It can fail to load at all on low bandwidth. There are all these “helpful” messages that make assumptions about how a community should operate, rather than letting us decide. And you have to remove stupid ideas like a popularity based sorting system to prevent it becoming an echo chamber, and greatly nerf features like “trust levels” that allow community moderation.

Pretty much any forum that offered a hosting solution would have been better if it could handle our large database being converted and was priced well. We basically had to shine up a turd. We did get more than a shiny turd out of the deal, but only barely. It’s just functional, not good.

It looks nice. And it mostly doesn’t go down. And it’s cheaper than vBulletin 4 or 5. But those are the only pure positives.

I don’t think I’d have followed any other forum to Discourse unless they did similar things. If they stuck with vanilla Discourse, I’d just not want to stick around. That almost happened here when we had mostly vanilla Discourse for a few days–I found myself putting off checking back in.

Sorry that’s so long and got on a bit of a side topic. But I thought it was relevant given the goal stated in the OP. To sum it up, the overarching point is that I recommend the following:

  1. Make sure Discourse (or whatever software you pick) is really a good fit for your forum, or that you’re willing to make it be a good fit.

  2. Communicate specifics about things that will need to be fixed, if any. Treat concerns about that stuff as legitimate, and not just people not liking change or throwing a fit.

And something I didn’t mention:

  1. Get someone like we did with a list of other changes to help people figure things out, if there’s not already a place you can link people to. While I could have figured it out all eventually, it’s nice not to have to waste time. And it may have taken others longer than it would have taken me, so they might just give up.
17

What was I thinking? I was thinking about how great it would be to have a site that didn’t either spin and spin before connecting or simply not connect at all! For me, the transition was welcome and overdue.

I don’t understand people. Things constantly change in this technologically accelerated world of ours. Heck, the apps on our phone are constantly updated. What’s the big deal?

18

Thanks. Not too surprising.

19

I’m in a sixth group then. I was excited about the change because it shakes things up and knew it would provide some entertaining discussion. And I prefer this board software - if you are open to using the new features it improves the experience. It’s not perfect but the old board was much less perfect.

20

I don’t disagree with this moderation, but I would also argue that the line they replied to was provocative, and that anyone who did have problems with the change would understandably feel insulted by being mocked in such a fashion.

Lots of people are not especially good with computers, and take a longer time to figure things out, especially among the older demographic that hangs out here. And times outside the board are quite tough, so everyone is on a short string these days.