Seeing now what discourse looks like for the SDMB, who thought this was a good idea? Did nobody think to suggest actual messageboard software instead of this reddit-style mess?
Honestly I would be happier if we just created a new reddit for each forum and called it good enough, leaving the old board locked but searchable for history reference. (An “SDMB Cafe Society” reddit, an “SDMB The Pit” reddit, etc…)
I’m seeing nothing I like about discourse more than I like reddit, and I don’t like reddit.
Then again, I haven’t been posting much lately so it’s essentially just a nice excuse to kind of give up on the SDMB, I guess.
Whoever thought discourse was the best move for the SDMB is clearly nuts.
Who knows, maybe I’m completely wrong and traffic actually goes up with this transition, but I’m pretty confident that board traffic will be shown to drop off a cliff in late June and not only never recover, but keep going down until its eventual demise.
I hope that doesn’t happen but I don’t see any way it won’t.
Yeah, I feel the same. I find the new interface strangely unpleasant. It isn’t just confusing – I am easily confused and after awhile I’d get over it. It’s just unfriendly. Ugh.
Okay, I think I found the website traffic site I was looking for, but it was tough since it is in fact called Alexa. Why did Amazon name their voice assistant Alexa? That must really annoy the Alexa web traffic people.
Doing a google search I found many hits from old SDMB threads discussing SDMB Alexa traffic in google but not one of them work. They all open this discourse as expected but with an “Oops, that link doesn’t exist or is private.” Meaning it doesn’t appear you can google any old threads on the SDMB anymore. I have to assume if that doesn’t get fixed that will be yet another blow to the traffic on this site.
Fortunately one of those google hits showed the complete Alexa link I needed and I was able to copy & paste it from that. Anyway, the traffic page showing us in freefall off a cliff is as follows and you can keep checking it as time marches on to witness when we hit bottom. Or who knows, maybe it rebounds? Right now as I type this it says the SDMB is ranked #38750 and dropping.
Alexa only does domains, looks like, so it doesn’t separate cecil’s columns from the boards. Still, it’s a number to look at.
I notice that we’re starting from now ranked around 38000-ish but 90 days ago we were ranked around 23000, meaning in the past 90 days the boards dropped 15000 ranks in terms of traffic. So I guess we were already falling off the cliff before this transition anyway.
I’m honestly having trouble wrapping my head around the angst here. Once I changed my theme (I’m using Vincent now), it’s actually seemed pretty reasonable. I’ve never loved infinite scroll, and I still don’t, but this is frankly a decent implementation of it. It might not scale to very long threads, but I mostly gave up on very long threads anyway. Also, I use a modern browser and have pretty low-latency, high-bandwidth fiber to the house, so maybe I’m just not experiencing some of the annoyances that others are.
On my first browse, I wondered what the hell all this crap was. After an hour of navigating around and playing with the settings, it’s back to being comfortable.
There are some things I don’t like as much, there are some things I like better. Mostly it’s just different, but It’s not a big deal if you just bear with that confusion for a few days. Most of us are here for the content, not the UI.
Or you’re just being a skosh overly dramatic. I imagine a lot of work from a lot of people went into making this happen just so we could keep our little corner of the Internet going without so many crashes.
I get it, it’s different, and it’s taking some effort to figure it all out. But it’s not nearly as bad as some of y’all are making out. And I’m really surprised how many posts some of y’all are posting just to say you won’t be posting here anymore.
Do_Not_Taunt, why does your Avatar circle just show green? With no ‘D’ in it?
My thoughts on the new board FWIW, I love this place so much I would follow them to hell. At first I thought I had gone to hell. I’m getting used to it. I’ve posted and read a lot. Practice, practice, practice. It gets easier.
Take time to find the right ‘theme’ for you and you device/browser. It makes a huge difference.
Easy peasy. I’m not much of an avatar guy - I was against them back in the vB days - but it looks like I have to have one here. So I went with the least noisy thing I could imagine.
Check out the new “Straight Dope Light” and “Straight Dope Dark” themes.
I hate change, so I’m glad these have been added.
P.S. As I noted in another thread, one thing I would change is to make the avatars for these themes square instead of round so as to match the old board.
Hi, kayaker, I hadn’t seen you posting.
Glad you’re here. Glad I’m here.
Felt like I went into the maternity ward, scared and worried and came out with the cutest, smartest baby evah!!
(Oh, wait: I’ll chant again: “it’s not all about me, it’s not all about me, it’s not all about me”…sorry)