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Keep the current forum.

4 (21.1%)

Keep the current forum as a subdomain for archival purposes, set up a new forum using a different platform.

15 (78.9%)

Total Members Voted: 19

[Mongrel]

Also, I guess we'll lose Arc's sole remaining bequest; our historic collection of thread icons.
 

[Lottel]

I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.

You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.

[MarsDragon]

I saw 'infinite scrolling' as the first point on the Discourse sell sheet and noped out of there. Let's not make things harder to navigate, okay?

Er, how so?

Well, they claim you can keep your place, but apparently that doesn't apply to casual browsing because I went into their huge test thread, scrolled down, backed out, then clicked again. Back to the beginning with most of the posts unloaded. I should hope the problems with browsing the forum should become obvious, then? (tip: I can jump anywhere I want with minimal loading in a paged thread. Can't do that with infinite scroll.) 

Plus, what's full loading time like for big threads? Even if we go to a smaller thread model, we'll still have megathreads like the OH schedule thread. Imagine having to load two or three years of schedules just to find out what's playing this Saturday.

Basically I just hate infinite scroll and consider it the worst thing that ever happened to the internet and would like to avoid it as much as possible.

[Mongrel]

Infinite scroll would basically break my posting or even viewing from my phone.

Of course, that may be considered a plus by some members of the forum.

[R^2]

At home I use a 27" monitor and reading stuff on these forums is a pain.

Aside from being Constant-mean, as long as I can keep doing LPs I have no strong feelings one way or the other. So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.

Otherwise I'll have to go do LPs on Talking Time, and nobody wants that.

Least of all Talking Time.

[Royal☭]

Infinite scroll might be capable of being disabled. Once I had an account there, I had no problem jumping in or out of threads. Plus, there's a button that'll take you to the most recent post in any thread. There's a lot I love about Discourse, and fully through my support behind it, even willing to skin or script it to see if I can do anything for our needs

[Lottel]

YA KNOW, the last time I was part of a forum that went through a software change, we switched to ning.

Who wants to ning it up? Huh? Huh? Show of hands. Come on.

[François]

Old-and-busted has its own special kind of charm, but I'm legitimately curious about any eventual New Hotness. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff out there that would make us look back and think "how did we ever manage without this". Not that I have any suggestions though, I know basically nothing about forum software.

[TA]

I would love the option for infinite scroll, or some other means of just loading an entire thread into one page.  For ease of searching big threads, and for the general hassle-avoidance of continually clicking through pages.

[Mongrel]

For those advocating certain new forum software, would it be possible for you guys to link to any working examples?

[A²]

Karma is like, a huge drama magnet.

[patito]

Discourse looks like an ugly piece of shit, let's not do that.

[R^2]

So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.

Infinite scrolling

Opposite problem, still terrible. Is it even remotely possible to turn off infinite scroll on a perthread basis? Who wants to load 200 images at a time until there are 4000 images on one page?

[Thad]

Basically I just hate infinite scroll and consider it the worst thing that ever happened to the internet and would like to avoid it as much as possible.

Karma is like, a huge drama magnet.

I'd like to keep the old threads archived somewhere but I'm perfectly okay with starting over.  Can't add much in the way of recommendations because I haven't really kept tabs on new software.

My usual complaints still apply: I think Guild Hall was and is a bad idea, and we've got too many subforums and megathreads.  BUT each serves its purpose in some way too.  It's nice to have a good, easy way of organizing things.

And I favor something with a robust means of keeping spammers and, say, eloH out.

Something with better phone support might be a good idea.  And the search function here's pretty hit-or-miss.  And if we do end up with something similar to our current boards/threads categorization, it'd be nice if splitmerging were a quicker process (which I suppose is also implicit in "better phone support").

I DO like our library of emoticons and the ease of spoilertagging and posting YouTube videos.

[TA]

So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.

Infinite scrolling

Opposite problem, still terrible. Is it even remotely possible to turn off infinite scroll on a perthread basis? Who wants to load 200 images at a time until there are 4000 images on one page?

Me when I'm reading your LPs.

[jsnlxndrlv]

I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.

You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.

Cool, I'll kick us off with an iteration that's intentionally wrong! The last thing we need is a brontoforumus subreddit, but now it exists regardless.

As much fun as it is to make sense of many-tiered quote-boxes charting the winding tendrils of conversations past to provide context to an individual response in one of our megathreads, I do think we'd benefit from some sort of threaded conversation system. What would be better is the option to switch between a threaded view and a sequential view, since the latter makes a lot more sense for LP threads and Werewolf (or other forum games).

Speaking of options, I'd be fine with the option to enable or disable infinite scroll, but if we had to commit to one or the other, I'd prefer no infinite.

I like karma; I'd like the ability to sort threads or posts by rating even better.

[Bongo Bill]

I liked it when the forums would tell me that someone had enjoyed one of my posts (and which one, and who) and I liked being able to tell the forums to do the same for somebody else. How you fuckers manage to keep turning that into drama is beyond me.

[Brentai]

From channel conversations I've developed the opinion that, for all its skin-crawling associations with Facebook and its ilk, a Like/Upvote button for individual posts is really the best way to go with karma.  We should have something that serves as a non-obtrusive alternative to "This", "Hahaha" and "Golgo 13 with a mustache" posts (but not a compulsory one - you can still explicitly second someone if you want), but I think associating opinions to specific posts rather than the poster him/herself is more appropriate, and negative feedback buttons really serve no purpose other than to generate arguments.  We've never had a problem with positive karma.  How the fuck do you even have a problem with positive karma?

As far as load-on-scroll goes, it should probably be optional at the very best.  It tends to cause a lot of problems if poorly implemented and some people just can't stand it, as opposed to paging which most people can at least tolerate.  A real paginator with an items-per-page option is obviously a good and modern idea and SMF's continued lack of any such thing is one of the many reasons why we're having this conversation.

Bongo brings up the most relevant argument against Discourse (and so did Soup, in the beginning): It's not quite baked yet.  There's probably going to be a lot of things changing, a lot of things breaking, and probably a lot of security holes opening and closing all over.  I wouldn't normally sweat that for a community this small but we seem to make a habit of pissing off script kiddiez, so I'd rather not give them something so easy to play with.

Image limits are clearly out, check.  Screenshot LPs are simultaneously the best argument for and against load-on-scroll, but since the main maintainer of such is against it we should probably lean thataways.  We should keep an eye out for something that makes such things easier to consume (especially on widescreen 27 inch monitors, like mine), but will also show up on a mobile device and not completely violate somebody's data plan.

The more skinnable, the better.  I want to give Kabbage the best canvas possible.

Gathering up other things mentioned in the thread:

• Conversation threading (might not want to hold your breath for this one)
• Subforums OR general organization.  Most of you guys seem to think that Discourse's lack of subforums is chaos and it really isn't, it has a tag cloud* and I really do think tag clouds could be pretty damned useful.  Instead of creating and managing a bunch of weird static subforums we just create tags on whatever fly we want and group relevant threads together, one-to-many.  Easy peasy, and no moving threads to this or that more appropriate forum is ever required.
• Emoticons.  I doubt any decent package will not support our emoticons.
• Highlight spoilertagging.  Agreed on this, dropdown spoilertags are the worst.
• Inline YouTube.  Probably not too hard to support.  tbf I kind of wish YouTube was a tag like img so that you could paste a YouTube URL and not have it turn into a video on you.
• Thread icons that don't rely on the one sysadmin FTPing gifs into an obscure directory on the backend of the system, then tricking the admin panel into recognizing it as the source icon of the thread's first post.
• Mobile browsing with images has already been covered but I guess I'll make it another bullet point just to drive the point in.  Remember that I probably spend more time browsing here on WAP2 than on a PC and I appreciate the simplicity, but it would actually be nice to not have to switch over to full mode to see what the hell people are replying to.  (I realize that this sounds like I'm implying that WAP2 itself is responsible for our WAP2 version not having images.  It's not.)
• Dolphin Dash No.
• Also covered above, but there needs to be a way to set a max-width on the forum because people have widescreen monitors now.  Or not, really - I wouldn't mind having this as an optional skin.  SMF supports this just fine, we just never bothered to do anything about it.

* Or at least it claims to, I only see a single category tag on their sandbox.


Addressing other concerns:

Well, what commitment level are we talking about here? If we migrate to new forum architecture, are we then stuck with that, or a different but still new alternate? Will switching back be easy or even feasible under a new server setup?

The only thing tying us to new architecture would be whatever posts we create in that system - if we end up becoming averse to losing those, we'd be stuck on that system for a while.  This right now is nice timing because there isn't anything like a Wolf game or an LP going on that a migration would interrupt.

We can (probably) come back to this board at any time, assuming I can safely migrate it over, which I fully intend to put every effort into doing.  It will be around either way, most likely just hanging around as its own subdomain (currently leaning heavily towards fossilized.brontoforum.us).

Also, I guess we'll lose Arc's sole remaining bequest; our historic collection of thread icons.

Again, plan is to archive entire forum in a subdomain - icons will go along with that.

Who wants to ning it up? Huh? Huh? Show of hands. Come on.

Keeping in mind that I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of social networking software, I cannot tell if you are actually being sarcastic here or not.

For those advocating certain new forum software, would it be possible for you guys to link to any working examples?

Discourse Sandbox: http://try.discourse.org/categories

I think Discourse itself is pretty much out of the race at this point, but it does serve as a pretty good marker for where we can start looking for features.  I doubt we'll ever get 100% of what we want without building the damned thing ourselves (and we'll never get 100% of what we all want as a group for obvious logical reasons), but we can sift through and pick our favorite nicked-up diamond in the rough.


I need sleep.

[Mongrel]

The Arc thing I was mostly kidding about. Though getting the ability to make new thread icons would be cool!

Also, I think it's pretty funny that I can't read discourse on my work browser (IE8 on a creaky XP box) AT ALL (remember kids, I work for a tech company!). 

[R^2]

This right now is nice timing because there isn't anything like a Wolf game or an LP going on that a migration would interrupt.

Glad you mentioned that's a factor. I'll hold off starting a new one until this is all done with, then.