New forums…scary…
Can we get a link to these in the portal so i can be lazy with my bookmarkings or is that part of the website going to come down?
i think the site itself is staying and the old forums are going read only.
My only critique so far is that I’m not a fan of the free form look it has opposed to the more structured top level, sub forum etc of PHPBB but maybe it will grow on me…like something I got from Klocker.
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Yeah, this is something that will take some getting used to.
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Don’t feel bad if you feel very strongly that these forums changed too much from what you are familiar to. That’s normal. There was the same push back on similar communities that had fallen into the same regimen that hasn’t evolved since the late 90s.
The good news is that the communities that are now biting the bullet and trying Discourse out are really warming up to it. Here are some others:
http://test.ubuntu-discourse.org/
http://discourse.soylent.me/
But make no mistake, there are certain things about Discourse that are the way they are for very specific purposes; we’ve done things like ass for a very long time in forum software and gotten used to it.
As always, I stand by to help out and answer questions as needed. But try things out, and definitely report in what you like and do not like.
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It has some sexy features with the dynamic pop-ups and shit, but the free-form, shit-everywhere kind of thing just makes me feel like I don’t know where to start when I hop on to visit. I always like a nice smooth UI at least.
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For a brand new board with not a lot of activity, it does have that vacant “I’m not sure where to begin” feeling, simply due to that classic structure being gone.
But once populated, you’re going to find it’s much quicker to get into topics.
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Feels almost disorganized, like everything is tossed into one big bin, with a couple of flags poking up saying “certain stuff here but it might have fallen into the other sections too.”
But hey, admittedly, I am a traditionalist.
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Content will start to fall into its respective categories as it gets used, and will feel less and less like a giant bucket.
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All this talk of things being tossed and buckets brings up an important question, am I allowed to be dirty or should we try and keep it PG13?
Also, portal link to discourse!!!
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stay dirty klocker. stay dirty.
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What he said. Stay dirty…within reason. Like all good Paladins, just use your best…JUDGEMENT.
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You can add Boing Boing to the list that has recently gone public with Discourse:
I do appreciate the reduction in clutter and the implementation of “likes”, etc. I think that’s a good move.
I see Jungard’s point regarding the lack of “structure”, but the opening page doesn’t seem that “loose” to me. I abhor change sometimes too, but I guarantee that when these forums change again, you’ll feel the same way about this set up as you did with the old 
I’m still looking at how to look up “new posts”. I know it’s more integrated now than it was before (we just had that link to view new posts), so it’s throwing me off 
Also, is there a way to remove topics from the stream that are now locked? Such as the Category: Descendants of Draenor?
Couple of ways:
- You can use the “New” and “Unread” navigation up at the top.
- You can go to the landing page, and browse topics that have a blue asterisk next to them (that’s the indicator for new posts)
- You can read through a topic, and then at the bottom of the topic, additional new/unread topics will appear, simply letting you chain read from topic to topic until you’re all caught up.
See if you can clear the pin. Pinning in Discourse is different than it is in other forums, but Jeff hasn’t yet decided what a good alternate word is the concept he’s trying to convey. Basically, in older forums, pinning was an admin-decided, site-wide concept (think “sticky”). Here, it’s user based. If you clear your pins, they won’t affect other people’s view of the site.
Well quoting is certainly much easier!! But to the point:
Pinning works, in my opinion. I knew by the design (and by name) what it’s function was without really having to guess, so I think it’s working appropriately. One suggestion: Some of the threads appeared to have the ability to “clear” right from the landing page, yet for some reason, that option seemed to disappear. Consequently, I had to enter each page and un-pin them individually. It would be nice to be able to do such a thing from the landing page, or all at once somehow. Obviously there are posts you’ll want folks to read straight away and therefore “lock” them from reading anything else (like we had on our old forums), but if this is all client side, it might help streamline the work-flow a bit when it comes to pinned items if we can alter it from the landing screen and not enter each topic (unless I just missed it again… I’m still playing with the functionality).
You can clear the pin from the landing page if the text is short enough. I noticed that with the “meta” description, it was too long, and the area which normally shows a link to “Clear Pin” was replaced with “Read More…”
If you’d care more to understand the mentality behind this new software, I’d recommend this video by Jeff himself:
Out of curiosity, where would our former “Tech Yourself” section fall under? “Fun” or will we have a “tech” tag?
@Bonechatters brought this up as well; I’ve resolved it by adding a “tech” category. Start a new topic under tech, specific to your hardware question, and we’ll take it from there!