Migrating the forum to Discourse

[ddavidebor]

Hello,
I have had this thought for a few years. Wouldn't it make sense to migrate the forum to the Discourse platform?

Yes, it's not easy. This is a big forum.

There are pretty much only advantages in switching platform, it's pretty much time, but there are risks in the migration also.

Pros:
* finally modern mobile experience
* much better readability for the forum
* improved engagement with younger audiences (!!!)
* way better search
* Ability to easily leverage managed databases such as digitalocean's ones which I personally recommend
* Lower resources consumption
* faster website
* improved engagement with the many tools discourse provide
* ease of moderation, discourse forums are mostly self-moderating requiring only limited oversight
* modern features like modern editor, better emojis, social login,
* way way way easier management and upgrades


Risks:
* broken link during migration. new and old website could be scanned and data compared to check for broken links before migrating. The discourse importer includes generation of all redirects required in theory.
* miss of custom functions?
* grumpy users complaining
* SEO issues - this should be ok with the redirects working.
* users need to reset the password

[ataradov]

NO, NO and NO.

All that new age stuff if unusable garbage for people that can't formulate a thought longer than a twit.

You are free to create an alternative and see how many people join.

[wraper]

* improved engagement

Fuck engagement. Argument for making games, forums or whatever with users into complete trash ridden with bells and whistles.

[StillTrying]

This must be a wiindup.

https://www.discourse.org/about

[Ice-Tea]

I see nothing in anything you mention or what I read on the Discourese website that beats "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

[Ranayna]

The Buzzwords are strong with this one :p

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.
But other than that, why would you migrate the forum to discord, of all places?

[Ampera]

SMF 2.1 is right around the corner, if there should be any upgrade it should be to that solely for security fixes and minor QoL improvements.

Besides that, the sole point of the forum is to be a place for people to create topics and reply to them. Best I can tell it does that just fine. If you can't do it on your phone, too bad, you can exist without the EEVBlog Forum until you get home and use something else if Tapatalk or just dealing with it isn't good enough for you.

It's not broke, don't fix it.

[SiliconWizard]

I have had this thought for a few years. Wouldn't it make sense to migrate the forum to the Discourse platform?

Why?

(...) it's pretty much time (...)

But why?

This forum works fairly well overall. Migrating the exisiting content to something else would probably be a nightmare, or next to impossible - I'm sure Dave has better things to do. And if EEVBlog's forum suddenly started afresh (with existing content lost), just for the sake of using something trendier, that would be a big loss.

There is one small thing that I see could be improved (and is probably not too hard to do) is easier inclusion of images in posts. Currently if you're attaching images in a post, you have to go some extra manual steps to include them in the post itself, and not just as small thumbnails at the end.

The search function could be improved, but I'm not sure this would really help a lot. I've seen people ask the same questions over and over again on almost all forums, however fancy the search function is.

My (limited) experience with forums based on Discourse is not that great. I think this forum is overall a lot more readable an usable than typical Discourse forums.

[Zero999]

I've never heard of Discourse and have no view on the matter, but many people who've responded seem to think it's shit, so it's clearly not worth the bother/risk.

[RoGeorge]

Wouldn't it make sense to migrate the forum to the Discourse platform?

NO!  If you want a better theme for mobile, just ask about that.

EEVblog forum works very well as it is now.
Let's not ruin it for buzzwords and glitter.

[daqq]

At a quick glance I see no added value, *maybe* aside from the better mobile interface, which I don't use anyway.

* much better readability for the forum

How does that work? I can read the forum just fine.

* improved engagement with younger audiences (!!!)

How does that work exactly? What's stopping younger audiences from using a standard forum?

* ease of moderation, discourse forums are mostly self-moderating requiring only limited oversight

How does self moderation work?

[Bud]

Hell NO. I do not want another stupid name platform.

[Messtechniker]

Never change a running system. I've seen a forum (Tonmeisterforum) die
completely because of an attempted forum software change. 

[magic]

How does self moderation work?

Probably some kind of voting where the posts most convincing to the largest number of readers end up at the top and others go down or disappear. Ever been to r*ddit?

[wraper]

How does self moderation work?

Probably some kind of voting where the posts most convincing to the largest number of readers end up at the top and others go down or disappear. Ever been to r*ddit?

Then it would be a shit show. And there were several cases when opinion of everyone about some technical question contradicted what I wrote. In the end after insisting several times turned out I was right. If comments moved according to likes, I guess it would end up in a shithole nobody reads.

[james_s]

From what I've seen, Discourse is horrible. It has gone with that "jumble of text floating in a sea of white" fad that makes it so hard for me to focus on anything. The mobile interface for this forum is horrid since the last update but at least on a proper browser it's quite good. It utilizes shading nicely to differentiate things from one another.

The mobile experience here was already broken by an update, why would we want to break the rest of the forum by migrating to a new platform? It works fine, leave it alone!

[amyk]

I'll add another "do NOT want!" to everyone else here who already has...

From link above:

Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high.

I've already had it with idiotic sites turning into bloated horrible web-apps that complain if your browser is even slightly older than the latest, despite the fact that something 20 years ago would've been perfectly fine for the functionality. The moment this site goes in that direction is the moment I leave.

[ataradov]

It has gone with that "jumble of text floating in a sea of white" fad that makes it so hard for me to focus on anything.

Yep, every time google leads me to a discourse forum, I just close the tab. It is usually a mess that is impossible to navigate and understand. But it has likes, follows and subscribes.

[ddavidebor]

At a quick glance I see no added value, *maybe* aside from the better mobile interface, which I don't use anyway.

* much better readability for the forum

How does that work? I can read the forum just fine.

The readability is mainly improved by dropping the "pages" for continuous loading.  In general, long threads are more readable on discourse, and can be browsed quickly by date through a cursor on the right side of the page. That alone is pretty much how it became popular.

At a quick glance I see no added value, *maybe* aside from the better mobile interface, which I don't use anyway.

* improved engagement with younger audiences (!!!)

How does that work exactly? What's stopping younger audiences from using a standard forum?

In general phpbb interface reflects standards with wich newer users are not familiar anymore and consider offputting.

At a quick glance I see no added value, *maybe* aside from the better mobile interface, which I don't use anyway.

* ease of moderation, discourse forums are mostly self-moderating requiring only limited oversight

How does self moderation work?

It has a structure where users progressively and automatically gain power as they gain engagement and respect from the community. Of course, the real power is in the hands of who controls the software.
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/who-has-which-moderation-powers-on-discourse/29805

[ddavidebor]

From what I've seen, Discourse is horrible. It has gone with that "jumble of text floating in a sea of white" fad that makes it so hard for me to focus on anything. The mobile interface for this forum is horrid since the last update but at least on a proper browser it's quite good. It utilizes shading nicely to differentiate things from one another.

The mobile experience here was already broken by an update, why would we want to break the rest of the forum by migrating to a new platform? It works fine, leave it alone!

I agree, the default theme is shit, but a couple of tweaks to make the page largers and change the color theme and it's pretty good. Many themes are available.

[wraper]

It has a structure where users progressively and automatically gain power as they gain engagement and respect from the community.

=Starving for gaining likes and dick length competition. We have other places for this crap.

[ataradov]

The readability is mainly improved by dropping the "pages" for continuous loading.

I personally hate continuous loading. It breaks orientation in space.

In general phpbb interface reflects standards with wich newer users are not familiar anymore and consider offputting.

Yes, and programming in C is considered obsolete. New users want Arduino.

Grow up and learn how to use forums. If you can't, do we really need you here?

It has a structure where users progressively and automatically gain power as they gain engagement and respect from the community.

And then you get StackOverflow kind of thing where people spew garbage to get points. No thanks. Moderation by human moderators works fine.

[PlainName]

Currently if you're attaching images in a post, you have to go some extra manual steps to include them in the post itself, and not just as small thumbnails at the end.

That's a massive plus! Imagine when it gets easy to embed the full-size photos in-text. Every thread will end up like Ice-T's buy/sell one where it takes forever to load a page and whilst it's doing that the bloody text is jumping up and down as the photos load (yes, the same big photos that loaded the previous time you looked at the page just a couple of hours ago).

In my opinion, it's not hard enough to embed in-text 

[magic]

The readability is mainly improved by dropping the "pages" for continuous loading.

Sounds like "say goodbye to your RAM when you open the TEA thread"

[ddavidebor]

The Buzzwords are strong with this one :p

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.
But other than that, why would you migrate the forum to discord, of all places?

It's a mature piece of software, gonna be 10yo soon. The architecture is good. It's not going to disappear next week. The UI is customizable. great community support. Ease of install and management. good performance. Written in a solid language. open source. It's considered the de-facto standard nowadays.