What to expect when you're Discoursing?
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I've been a lurker here for quite some time, after discovering the site a few years ago and reading through all the articles. I decided to sign up after learning that a development community I'm part of is moving to Discourse (we're currently using Kunena). Knowing your storied history with Discourse, I'm certain you're the right people to ask: what should I be aware of when we move? What do I need to know to avoid Doing it Wrong™?
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Are you going to be paying customers? That seems to make a big difference in the sort of responses you'll get.
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Think if it like a trip to the clap clinic. Avoid at all costs unless you want to do free QA for some cunt in an ivory tower with the prettiest bike shed you'll ever find. Incidentally you'll be spending so much time behind the bike shed you'll be on first name basis with all the clap clinic staff.
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Do your users use smartphones much?
Discourse has lots of issues with them. Especially Windows Phone and iOS (Android possibly not so much anymore).
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what should I be aware of when we move
Pain. Misery. Despair. Anger.
What do I need to know to avoid
Uneven terrain. Makes it harder to run away.
On a more serious note:
- Are you going to try importing existing content? We didn't have much luck with that.
- What part of Discourse functionality is the thing that made your community switch to Discourse as opposed to other platforms?
- Do you need massive threads? Those don't really bode well on Discourse, though apparently something is being done about it. How that will work out we don't know yet.
- Mobile is horrid, as stated above. Even ignoring the performance issues that might or might not be fixed battery drain is legendary.
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Do your users use smartphones much?
Discourse has lots of issues with them. Especially Windows Phone and iOS (Android possibly not so much anymore).
Discourse doesn't work at all on my ~3 year old android phone. It locks up or crashes, sometimes both.
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Are you going to be paying customers? That seems to make a big difference in the sort of responses you'll get.
I presume so. I'm just a member of the forum and not part of the decision-making process. I'm wondering what I should be aware of as a user of the software and not a manager of it.
On a more serious note:
- Are you going to try importing existing content? We didn't have much luck with that.
- What part of Discourse functionality is the thing that made your community switch to Discourse as opposed to other platforms?
- Do you need massive threads? Those don't really bode well on Discourse, though apparently something is being done about it. How that will work out we don't know yet.
- Mobile is horrid, as stated above. Even ignoring the performance issues that might or might not be fixed battery drain is legendary.
They will be importing existing posts.
I don't know why Discourse was chosen over something else, I'm just a user, not an administrator.
Most of our threads don't go above a couple hundred replies, so hopefully that won't be an issue.
I do occasionally view the forum from my phone, although I don't know how frequently others do. Regardless, this doesn't bode well.
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Works OK on my year old android phone. If you define OK as slow as fuck and eating battery as fast as humanly possible. If the devs could swap those two around, I would be happy(ish)
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Most of our threads don't go above a couple hundred replies, so hopefully that won't be an issue.
You'll probably be OK, then. Sever sizing seems to be a big issue. I suppose it would also depend on the size of your user base.
The other thing your'e going to have issues with is markdown. Especially inside quotes. Being a developer forum, you guys will probably have lots of code and whatever getting thrown around. Expect people to be frustrated by unpredictable formatting.
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There are many other forum alternatives if you're moving off of one of the "old guard" of community forum softwares.
I'd advise you to tell whoever is in charge at your forum to look at all options before settling on one, like the TDWTF community here is doing!
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Especially Windows Phone and iOS
But ... but I thought iOS was the one, true mobile platform they do actually support.
Discourse doesn't work at all on my ~3 year old android phone.
On my ~5 year old iOS device, I can read ok, but I cannot post, period. I think I managed to post once from mobile — once, in a year and a half.
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Being a developer forum, you guys will probably have lots of code and whatever getting thrown around. Expect people to be frustrated by unpredictable formatting.
Didn't Jeff once say, essentially, "Developers, yeah, you're different," and that Discourse wasn't designed for us? (or for anybody else that has a clue, but he didn't actually say that.)
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But ... but I thought iOS was the one, true mobile platform they do actually support.
Mobile Safari is their IE6.
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Didn't Jeff once say, essentially, "Developers, yeah, you're different," and that Discourse wasn't designed for us? (or for anybody else that has a clue, but he didn't actually say that.)
Possibly. What I've heard him say is that he's not big on getting UX tips from developers because we think differently than "normal" users. I think he's not completely wrong about that, and of course there are lots of discourse installations that are not populated by developers, but we were coming to him based on our experience as users.
Little did we know that instead of improving the usability of his project we were exposing his ass hattery.
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I don't know why Discourse was chosen over something else, I'm just a user, not an administrator.
The main reason I'm asking is, if it's live updates and oneboxing and such, for a strictly development purposes something like Slack might fill that niche better than any forum software. Plus it gives you stuff like IRC and XMPP integration out of the box. Everything else should be covered by a more traditional and stable forum software no problem.
Also, yes, there are other contenders slowly turning up on the market, but I'd say they are still less production-ready than even Discourse.
In your situation, I'd try running Discourse (or any other forum software, really) in parallel for a while before committing to going through the pain of content migration.
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I mostly like it, use it on various iDevices without much pain, and on a low volume forum it works reasonably well. The recurring idiocy on meta.d makes me want to rage quit Discourse now and then but the alternatives haven't been enticing enough. So probably your mileage will vary and there'll be significant friction and pain (some of it in the sense thanks to the developer attitude to bugs and unexpected usage patterns) when switching, but once you've learned not to Do It Wrong, it's mostly survivable...
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what should I be aware of when we move?
You won't be able to post MD5 of asterisk character in bold.
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There are many other forum alternatives if you're moving off of one of the "old guard" of community forum softwares.
I'd advise you to tell whoever is in charge at your forum to look at all options before settling on one, like the TDWTF community here is doing!
NB: He's from nodebb :P
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NB: He's from nodebb
Oh, good! I was afraid he was from the Internet!
Filed under: Yes, I knew that, but I'm bored...
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Filed Under: 3389dae361af79b04c9c8e7057f60cc6
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That's exactly why it won't be fixed - there's known workaround. It was also the reason why the
***\****
bug was initially rejected until @sam fixed it out of nowhere.
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@HeimrArnadalr said:
I don't know why Discourse was chosen over something else, I'm just a user, not an administrator.
The main reason I'm asking is, if it's live updates and oneboxing and such, for a strictly development purposes something like Slack might fill that niche better than any forum software. Plus it gives you stuff like IRC and XMPP integration out of the box. Everything else should be covered by a more traditional and stable forum software no problem.
Also, yes, there are other contenders slowly turning up on the market, but I'd say they are still less production-ready than even Discourse.
In your situation, I'd try running Discourse (or any other forum software, really) in parallel for a while before committing to going through the pain of content migration.
I get the feeling we're past the point of no return here - one of our administrators has the 'Customer' badge on meta.d, and they've apparently added a feature to Discourse at her request.
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Are you whisperpost forum?
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Are you whisperpost forum?
If so, where do I go to join? Research reasons, you understand
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what should I be aware of when we move?
That you shouldn't have moved to Discourse.
What do I need to know to avoid Doing it Wrong™?
Don't install Discourse.
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Expect the unexpected.
Srsly. The problems change day by day...
I was logged in for months.
Find myself being told "you have to be logged in to do that"
Whaaa? I am logged in!
Look my Avatar (such as it is) is right there!!
I even have to logout to find a control in order to login
.... wash, rinse, repeat for the last two days.
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Are you whisperpost forum?
No. Ever hear of ROBLOX? It's a site where people make games for kids. We have a private forum for developers and that's what's getting moved.
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Android possibly not so much anymore
Android is basically usable most of the time, if you don't mind the occasional jellypotato, and losing 20% of your battery in under an hour. Also trying to quote reply is a total PITA.
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I think Roblox is a game Steam keeps trying to get me to buy.
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I feel morally obliged to point out that while reading this thread (on Chrome/Win8.1) that I got a "An error has occurred" dialog box from out of nowhere for no apparent reason. I was't even attempting to interact with the site in any way at the time.
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@sloosecannon said:
NB: He's from nodebb
Oh, good! I was afraid he was from the Internet!
That's nothing. I was afraid he was coming from inside the house.
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what should I be aware of when we move?
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Android possibly not so much anymore
I have a flagship phone--an LG G3--and I would only call Discourse "technically usable" on it.
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This post is deleted!
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I saw that
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NB: He's from nodebb
shhhh
Edit: Why's there no quote button on mobile?
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mobile
Oh you're on mobile?
That's different
-Jeff
Because Discourse mobile is... special
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function codeHighlighting(is, done) local like return "this" end
```lua function codeHighlighting(is, done) local like return "this" end ```
c = script.parent:children() local i = 0 for o in c do i = i + 1 end
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This post is deleted!
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what should I be aware of when we move? What do I need to know to avoid Doing it Wrong™?
In case no one else has linked it:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/things-our-customers-have-said-about-discourse-thread/2202
Also, if you use Discourse, the terrorists win. Jeff Atwood is one of the founding members of ISIS and Discourse is their official discussion platform.
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So all we need to do to stop ISIS is give them the idea of starting a "Likes" thread?
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Also, yes.
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we think differently than "normal" users
Absolutely. Normal users have no problem learning markdown instead of pressing **C-B**strong text, or inserting html tags like
<kbd></>
. Only a developer would have problems with that.
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There is, but if you're on IOS you cannot just select a text block. You have to fiddle around until you get the little movable start- and end-lollipops. Then you can press IOS'
Copy
button to get rid of that floater and underneath it you may find Discourse's grey "Quote Reply".Or you can press the button in the soon-to-be-removed-because-noobs-don't-need-it toolbar.
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Or you can press the button in the soon-to-be-removed-because-noobs-don't-need-it toolbar.
The toolbar is not present on mobile, IIRC. Is it? Can't check atm.
Oh, also in order to preserve the emojicon I should probably not select-quote but quote all...
There is, but if you're on IOS you cannot just select a text block. You have to fiddle around until you get the little movable start- and end-lollipops. Then you can press IOS'
Copy
button to get rid of that floater and underneath it you may find Discourse's grey "Quote Reply".Or you can press the button in the soon-to-be-removed-because-noobs-don't-need-it toolbar.
Trim the extra bits...
Or you can press the button in the soon-to-be-removed-because-noobs-don't-need-it toolbar.
There we go! User friendly!
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one of our administrators has the 'Customer' badge
That means you paid, expect much better customer service than we got.
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There we go! User friendly!
But it's a misquote.
The real way would be:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said:Or you can press the button in the soon-to-be-removed-because-noobs-don't-need-it toolbar.
(Not the expander )
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That means you paid, expect much better customer service than we got.
For "View raw" and editor extensions you'll have to pay us though. We take payment in number of bans you get on meta.d.