This is a forum upgrade?

Not my cup of tea but sounds like the migration went reasonably well. And, I don’t know Discourse software but checking in multiple browsers shows no third-party scripts or tracking. Tip of the hat to AmberV and the others involved in the months-long project.

To come back to this query: that is not something to be concerned about for the most part. One can get to a level of trust with the system that sticks permanently, and with that comes the ability to edit wiki posts, and pretty much everything else you would expect—it shouldn’t feel at all restrictive. We’ll no doubt tweak the settings a bit to see how it all works out, and find that balance between what is easy to abuse and what feels too restrictive.

The only level you can lose over time is 3, and that’s a tougher one to achieve and maintain. That one grants you a limited degree of moderation power. You would be able to hide spam posts yourself, help categorise posts that are misfiled, create tags, etc. So it’s understandable that this level would require an amount of ongoing commitment over time, as well as a level of positive support from the community. But for one that does get to that level, it shouldn’t be too hard to get it back if you take a break for a while (currently the time-out on that is 100 days).

Telepathic presumptions aside (which I would consider to be inaccurate), I’d be curious to know what aspects you feel or more or less conducive to a community-oriented forum design? There is obviously going to be a large degree of subjectivity (and debate) on that matter, but to at least point to what the Discourse developers themselves have to say on the topic, I think it’s very clear they are coming from the topic of forum design software from a community-centric standpoint. By way of example, are some of their thoughts, as they relate to whether design should inform community health or whether rules work best.

As for my own opinions: I never found the rigidly hierarchical approach of the traditional forum layout to be conducive to community building. Discussions get squirreled away into little pockets (Scrivener - Scrivener for macOS - Feedback) that might very well be of interest to other people who wouldn’t think to drill down that far or into that particular branch of the overall discussion. Being able to post to “Scrivener” with your post tagged as “Feedback” means everyone can more immediately engage with your thoughts, and what was once a buried post hardly anyone saw may now foster a discussion on the matter. Meanwhile, you can still post more specific feedback if that is best, as well.

To come back to your first assertion, that one in particular confuses me, but that may because I see support and community as being ideally very closely related. The most successful software forums I’ve participated in are examples of this idealistic merging between query, discussion and official support.

Yeah, I used to check in every few days when I had time, read every thread that was meaningful to me (in what used to be three separate Windows for Scrivener related forums?) and then track—by time of the post—where I left off so next time I logged in I could tell where to pick up again.

Now, that has become impossible, and too time-consuming to think about.

For starters, I hate that everything is grouped together in one huge forum rather than “Technical Support”, “Bug Hunt”, and “Feedback”.

And when was the last post? When the date of the post was identified such as May 16, 2021, I could easily tell where I left off. Now, that was what—oh, yeah—3d ago. Ugh.

So, unless I’m really struggling with the program, from here on out I will not be checking in, no matter how much I could learn about a little known (to me) feature.

Thanks. It used to be fun. Sorry if I sound grumpy. Perhaps I’ve had too little coffee this morning.

I’m not particularly keen on the new look but I guess I will get used to it.

More to the point I can’t get my RSS reader to see the new forum. Has anyone a link to the RSS feed?

Just seen the separate topic. Hopefully the feed will be up soon as it simply isn’t there for me with NetNewswire.

I’m fairly confident any older feed URLs won’t be compatible, as they would all be pointing to phpBB feed API. You should be able to update the URLs on the feeds you want to monitor in your software/site. Now that I look at it though, I’m not seeing the feed icon in my browser, so I might have to look into what’s going on there. I’m pretty sure that’s a stock feature anyway.

There should be no loss in granularity, for example:

One thing we always struggled with in the previous organisation scheme is that it wasn’t often known which sub-sub-category was best to post within. We were constantly having to move posts around that were filed incorrectly, or for things that evolved from what was at the time thought to be a support request but turned into a bug report, etc. While there is still a degree of that which will always exist, the new scheme is a lot more fluid and easy to manage, when that happens. If something turns out to be a bug, I can fix that with a couple of clicks whereas in the past I had to go through multiple menus and confirmation boxes to formally move the topic. The overhead for management was such that often it just didn’t get done, resulting in long-term messes.

And of course on the flip side of your preference, if in fact one wishes to browse bug reports and support questions at once, you can do so in one single list. That wasn’t something you could ever easily do before, and was a real pain if you were more interested in intersections across areas of interest.

I’m relieved to see the old forum sent out to pasture. The new one is a million times better, in my view. Complimenti!

I agree. Marking as read clears the decks.

The URLs I’m using for RSS are:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/feed.php?mode=topics_active

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/feed.php?mode=news

They should probably be using https but they’ve always worked until the change to the new forum.

Literature & Latte Forums - Latest topics this should work.

I think you can just add .rss to the end of a lot of addresses and it should work.

Update: I see my posts in a part of the forum, but not when I click “My Posts” in another section.

I reset my password (based on user id, not email address), but “My Posts” is empty.

Aside from the other issues with spotting where I left off, I really miss the marker for threads I’d contributed to. It became a great marker for threads I was really interested in, and very easy to spot.

Is there nothing like that in this new SW?

Thanks. I know this kind of conversion is a ton of headachy work.

Thomas

Oh, and what happened to my signature? Did I miss that option?

Thomas

Anyone else notice that the link to sign up for the forums is now broken? Did I miss something from Support on that?

To be honest, if the writing was right-to-left or upside-down I would still be happy because DARK MODE!!!

Realistically, except from a vending machine, perhaps, change is inevitable and won’t keep me awake at night .

Party on, all

Though it isn’t identical, you can clear multiple unread posts via the New and/or Unread views: e.g. https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/new — after a while that will allow you to track new posts since your last visit – for me the cool thing is that New / Unread are contextual, so depending on what your Category and Tag dropdown is set to this will filter what they show, at least on another forum I use it does that.

I do like the new forum. I never liked the one before because the font was to thin to read comfortably and I’m referring only to my Mac. On mobile it was not readable at all, at least for my eyes.

Like Katherine I’m used to Discourse from other forums and also like her I had been confused more than once because they all look quite similar. The brown colour used in the page elements here helps to distinguish where I am. Glad to see the way to massive brown background is gone though.

So for me it’s an overall improvement—with tiny adjustments necessary here and there. But that’s okay and very common for something new.

What I’d like to see was a bigger and, again, a not so light font (the latter most of all on the start page). This was better a few days ago if I remember correctly. If I may point at another Discourse forum as an example.

Oh, and another plus of Discourse/a Markdown driven forum—try to print a page, the result is excellent.

The Settings > Interface options allows you to scale the default font quite a bit, and Discourse’s layout works well with directly zooming your browser view. The font here at the moment is Helvetica, which shouldn’t be too “thin” if you get the size right for your eyesight…