General > General Technical Chat

Migrating the forum to Discourse

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nctnico:
I used to be on a mailing list which has moved to Discourse. Traffic on the mailing list wasn't high but now it seems there is no traffic at all (assuming I still receive summaries if people post something).

tooki:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on March 29, 2020, 11:45:24 pm ---
--- Quote from: Ranayna on March 29, 2020, 06:38:21 pm ---But on a sidenote: Yes, the forum software shows it's age, and migration to some more modern software should be considered. Modern software like Xenforo can introduce a lot of new useful features without loosing it's spirit of what a forum actually represents.
--- End quote ---

Yes, SMF is showing its age, and I am a member on another forum that moved over the Xenforo (from I think phpBB) and I really like it. There were hardly any complaints from users too.
So I would be certainly open to moving to that, but it's got to be done right and professionally, not something that can be half arsed. I'd have to pay a professional to manage the move.

--- End quote ---
Completely agree, it's money well spent. Yeeeeeeaaaaars ago (like 1999 or 2000), a forum I was then a moderator on (later user-side admin) moved from uBB to vBulletin (so also from one commercial product to another), and IIRC, having support from the vBulletin folks was invaluable. Over the years (that forum is still on vBulletin), having the support contract with the developer was well worth it, as they helped our web dev to implement a handful of custom things. (That being a Mac forum, back in the days when it was mostly graphic designers and other creatives using Macs, everyone involved had quite high expectations, both visually and usability-wise, and frankly, they did a great job of it — it looked way ahead of its time, and still looks good today. But on occasion it required some tweaks to the software to get it to really work just right. Our custom, professionally-designed forum skin and the custom software hooks served it well. The forum is still around, with over twice as many registered users and over twice as many posts as EEVblog right now, but it's absolutely moribund. From the looks of it, subforums that used to get maybe 5-10 new threads per day 15 years ago now have that many in a quarter.  :'( At least it's still around as an archive...)

james_s:
I don't know how anyone can tolerate the sea of whitespace thing, I know I have sensitive eyes but it causes me physical discomfort to look at, it's like staring into a spotlight trying to read some text printed on the lens. I can turn down the brightness but then the contrast goes away. There is no shading separating different areas causing everything to blend together. This forum is not without flaws but at least the desktop version is nicely readable. It has good information density, it uses shading to good effect indicating clearly where active text entry boxes are, and while the background behind the text is still bright white at least the gray around it provides some contrast and mutes the overall brightness.

This same trend is the first thing I noticed about Win10 when my former employer moved over to it, everything was a just floating in a jumble on a sea of bright white, suddenly it was no longer obvious what was a clickable control, text entry box or background object. Decades of UI design and refinement thrown out overnight in the quest of being trendy and fashionable. Visual cues were used everywhere because they make the software easier to use. Shading and separators break things up and organize them the same way you probably arrange your tools in a toolbox and categorize small parts in some sort of bins instead of just dumping everything out spread across your workbench.

james_s:

--- Quote from: tooki on March 30, 2020, 12:28:16 am ---Completely agree, it's money well spent. Yeeeeeeaaaaars ago (like 1999 or 2000), a forum I was then a moderator on (later user-side admin) moved from uBB to vBulletin (so also from one commercial product to another), and IIRC, having support from the vBulletin folks was invaluable. Over the years (that forum is still on vBulletin), having the support contract with the developer was well worth it, as they helped our web dev to implement a handful of custom things. (That being a Mac forum, back in the days when it was mostly graphic designers and other creatives using Macs, everyone involved had quite high expectations, both visually and usability-wise, and frankly, they did a great job of it — it looked way ahead of its time, and still looks good today. But on occasion it required some tweaks to the software to get it to really work just right. Our custom, professionally-designed forum skin and the custom software hooks served it well. The forum is still around, with over twice as many registered users and over twice as many posts as EEVblog right now, but it's absolutely moribund. From the looks of it, subforums that used to get maybe 5-10 new threads per day 15 years ago now have that many in a quarter.  :'( At least it's still around as an archive...)

--- End quote ---

I once actively used a handful of quite popular Yahoo groups starting in the early 2000's and was a moderator on one of them. These were thriving communities used by hundreds of people and then one day a while back, (maybe 10 years ago?) Yahoo redesigned it all and almost overnight the whole thing crashed and burned. It became so unusable that most of the users abandoned it right away, the internet filled with hoards of people complaining about the new design but Yahoo was unwavering. Usage continued to collapse and all the groups I was on became ghost towns. Finally more recently I read that the struggling Yahoo was closing down groups altogether, at that point it no longer mattered.

Some companies seem to have a motto of "If it ain't broke, fix it 'till it is."

Whales:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 30, 2020, 12:28:59 am ---This same trend is the first thing I noticed about Win10 when my former employer moved over to it, everything was a just floating in a jumble on a sea of bright white, suddenly it was no longer obvious what was a clickable control, text entry box or background object. Decades of UI design and refinement thrown out overnight in the quest of being trendy and fashionable.

--- End quote ---

There were rumours that the MS UI design team was drawing the new UIs in powerpoint and then sending these off to the programmers.

What's the value in decades of human interface experience when you could be shiny?  The Law of Least Astonishment is now about avoiding users going "eww, that's old-looking" rather than "wtf is this app doing why can't I even".  The former is now considered worse than the latter, everything is about appearance and marketing.

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