Author Topic: Migrating the forum to Discourse (Read 35153 times)

Karel · « **Reply #75 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:33:57 pm »

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm

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.

Please no.
Discourse looks terrible. Too much white space. Default fonts too big. Graphics too big. Everything is too big. Terrible teletubbies look.

KE5FX · « **Reply #76 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:36:22 pm »

EEVblog · « **Reply #77 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:40:23 pm »

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm

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

I hate discourse, it's garbage, and doesn't seem at all suited to long term community forum type discussion. It's more of a chat platform from what I gather.
So it's not going to happen, not point even discussing it, it would destroy this forum community.
If this forum is going to move to something it will be a better and more familiar bbs style forum, like Zenforo

EEVblog · « **Reply #78 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:42:33 pm »

Quote from: ataradov on March 29, 2020, 05:17:47 pm

NO, NO and NO.
All that new age stuff if unusable garbage for people that can't formulate a thought longer than a twit.

From my limited experience that's what I've seen, it's just quick zero-thought chat type content.
On bbs style forum's like this people put a lot more thought and effort into a good post. Some posts are so good and technically detailed they become direct go-to pages in the internet.
Discourse is such a terrible idea it's not funny.

EEVblog · « **Reply #79 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.

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.

EEVblog · « **Reply #80 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:48:35 pm »

Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 29, 2020, 07:10:00 pm

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.

This is one thing I love about Zenforo, you just CTRL-V paste the image inline in the post, it's awesome.

EEVblog · « **Reply #81 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:53:16 pm »

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 10:22:33 pm

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.

And it's shit to use and completely unsuitable for replacing an existing bbs style community forum.

xrunner · « **Reply #82 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:54:39 pm »

Quote from: EEVblog on March 29, 2020, 11:45:24 pm

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.

Really. So many of us have put a lot of content here - repair threads and pics to go with those threads. So many tips that are not found in very many places out there. It would be a tragedy if something went wrong. I know you understand that!

EEVblog · « **Reply #83 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:56:29 pm »

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 10:33:05 pm

Quote from: RoGeorge on March 29, 2020, 07:27:27 pm
Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm
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.

I have seen it being asked many years ago, popping up many times since there, and never ended up anywhere. I've been following the forum since it's inception a decade ago.

A few people have asked for an EEVblog Discord, and there is actually one. But one has ever asked to replace this forum with discord until your post, because most people realise what a dumb idea that would be.

EEVblog · « **Reply #84 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:57:20 pm »

Quote from: xrunner on March 29, 2020, 11:54:39 pm

Quote from: EEVblog on March 29, 2020, 11:45:24 pm
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.
Really. So many of us have put a lot of content here - repair threads and pics to go with those threads. So many tips that are not found in very many places out there. It would be a tragedy if something went wrong. I know you understand that!

If you manage it right, it's impossible to lose the existing forum.

Monkeh · « **Reply #85 on:** March 29, 2020, 11:59:45 pm »

Quote from: EEVblog on March 29, 2020, 11:56:29 pm

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 10:33:05 pm
Quote from: RoGeorge on March 29, 2020, 07:27:27 pm
Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm
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.

I have seen it being asked many years ago, popping up many times since there, and never ended up anywhere. I've been following the forum since it's inception a decade ago.

A few people have asked for an EEVblog Discord, and there is actually one. But one has ever asked to replace this forum with discord until your post, because most people realise what a dumb idea that would be.

Wait wait wait, when did Discord come into things? Discourse and Discord aren't the same thing.

ddavidebor · « **Reply #86 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:02:16 am »

Quote from: tooki on March 29, 2020, 11:16:22 pm

Quote from: amyk on March 29, 2020, 11:02:27 pm
I just noticed the OP is from Italy... maybe the stress of the quarantine is getting to him.
And now suddenly changed to UK!

I now live in the UK, my company moved with me as well.

ddavidebor · « **Reply #87 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:06:36 am »

Quote from: Monkeh on March 29, 2020, 11:13:52 pm

Quote from: ataradov on March 29, 2020, 11:13:02 pm
Quote from: Monkeh on March 29, 2020, 11:08:40 pm
Elastic and Cloudflare are on similar scale (for activity, at least, not quite so much content yet). The rest are all tiny.
Elastic has a lot of new topics, but most seem to have 0 replies. They all look like drive-by posting. The same person will never return back.

And the only people that seem to respond are actual employees, so it is again a just a support forum.

Perhaps so, I only skimmed the stats.

Interestingly he neglected to mention one site from his magical wappalyzer which is actually an active community: https://community.home-assistant.io/
At over a thousand posts a day across the last 30 days, it's genuinely quite active. A lot of it is support requests (then again, what are electronics questions?), but it's a fairly active project with a lot happening.

Interesting

EEVblog · « **Reply #88 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:08:41 am »

Quote from: Monkeh on March 29, 2020, 11:59:45 pm

Quote from: EEVblog on March 29, 2020, 11:56:29 pm
Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 10:33:05 pm
Quote from: RoGeorge on March 29, 2020, 07:27:27 pm
Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm
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.

I have seen it being asked many years ago, popping up many times since there, and never ended up anywhere. I've been following the forum since it's inception a decade ago.

A few people have asked for an EEVblog Discord, and there is actually one. But one has ever asked to replace this forum with discord until your post, because most people realise what a dumb idea that would be.

Wait wait wait, when did Discord come into things? Discourse and Discord aren't the same thing.

Oops, my mistake!
Ah, discourse, right.
It's still meh. And again, completely different from a bbs style forum. You don't go changing a 10 year established bbs style forum to discourse, that's just dumb.
I believe Chris Gammell uses it for his kicad forum:
https://forum.kicad.info/

0culus · « **Reply #89 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:13:37 am »

My 2 cents is HELL no. The reason I come here and enjoy my time here is because this is a FORUM and not social media style bullcrap where visibility of any topic is a popularity contest (that of course is easily gamed by bots) that has infected practically everything else. If this place goes that way, I'm gone.

nctnico · « **Reply #90 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:15:03 am »

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 · « **Reply #91 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:28:16 am »

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.

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.

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 · « **Reply #92 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:28:59 am »

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 · « **Reply #93 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:34:10 am »

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...)

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 · « **Reply #94 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:47:13 am »

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.

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.

EEVblog · « **Reply #95 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:48:43 am »

Quote from: james_s on March 30, 2020, 12:34:10 am

Finally more recently I read that the struggling Yahoo was closing down groups altogether, at that point it no longer mattered.

Yes, it's gone completely, erased from existence

I spent more than a decade as the top poster on the OzCanyons Yahoo group before someone set up a Facebook group and it slowly died. Now the entire thing is gone, forgotten to history.

ataradov · « **Reply #96 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:50:59 am »

The flat UI trend is easy to explain. Graphics cards can draw filled rectangles really fast. So it is easy if UI is just flat rectangles.

Doing 3D control elements is also hard on 4K and 8K monitors, since your elements need to scale appropriately now. And again, filled rectangles scale easily.

BU508A · « **Reply #97 on:** March 30, 2020, 12:51:40 am »

Quote from: ddavidebor on March 29, 2020, 02:59:35 pm

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

Simple answer:

NO

Brumby · « **Reply #98 on:** March 30, 2020, 01:21:11 am »

I saw the original post (at ~1am here) and my first reaction was "No" - but I thought it best to sleep on it.

The subsequent responses have covered many points of concern I had - whitespace, continuous loading, drive by posts and so on. I am consistently bewildered by the claims of "improved usability" where it is just buzzwords dropped around something new which doesn't actually make things better. It's just "new". (BTW ... age, in itself, is NOT a reason to discard anything - IMHO).

There is, however, one aspect I have not seen mentioned - and that is one of discipline.

It does take a (tiny) bit of effort navigating here and that may require some measure of thought - to understand how to package what you want to say in a post. As has been said above, there is a lot of well thought out material here. What would be absolutely crippling to the value offered here is to make the platform so "engaging" that a flood of useless crap washes in, burying the gems.

So, I would suggest that if people really want to engage with those who have an extremely diverse range of skill and experience, then develop the discipline to learn how to do that in the framework that currently exists ... and works. If someone does not want to go to the "trouble" of working within an established environment, then I don't think I want to go to the trouble of pandering to their displeasure in having to learn.

I say this not as a put down to change, since adapting is one of the key characteristics of success - but that so much engineering is built from old, boring basics and putting yourself out to understand these through the simple application of oneself will serve you well.

In short, if you can't find the discipline to work within the current framework, then maybe you should avoid engineering pursuits.

james_s · « **Reply #99 on:** March 30, 2020, 01:24:28 am »

Quote from: ataradov on March 30, 2020, 12:50:59 am

The flat UI trend is easy to explain. Graphics cards can draw filled rectangles really fast. So it is easy if UI is just flat rectangles.

Doing 3D control elements is also hard on 4K and 8K monitors, since your elements need to scale appropriately now. And again, filled rectangles scale easily.

Graphics cards can create textured 3D shapes easily now too so that's not really an issue. Also there is a very wide space between the super flat whitewashed thing that was all the rage a few years ago and Vista-style 3D everything. Even subtle visual cues like raised buttons, shadows and shading can make something far more usable. A raised button with a shadow is no harder to scale than a link that is just text on a white background. These are not insurmountable technical hurdles, I expect software to get better and more refined with time, not worse.

Also the scaling thing is a non-issue anyway. I have a high resolution monitor because I want to display a lot of things on it at once. If the UI simply scales to make everything bigger then it negates most of the reason of having a high resolution display in the first place. A 4k display ought to be plenty to tile a PCB layout, one or more datasheets and a BOM for example all visible at once. About the only time I ever maximize one program to fill the whole screen is if I'm using my computer to watch TV/movies. Otherwise I typically use about 1/4-1/2 of the display area per active window depending on what I'm doing.


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Author Topic: Migrating the forum to Discourse (Read 35153 times)

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