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/categoriesI 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.