Kristen-173977 (9/19/2015)
The software on this forum is stone-age, as was SQL Team's before the upgrade, and I curse what SQL Team had before, and what is currently in use here (I have no idea why all the learned people posting here put up with it, and I think the hosts are taking advantage of them, and their free PR, and in return ought to be providing much better facilities for them). But, for me, Discourse is most definitely not the solution. Clearly MarkDown works well on Stackoverflow, but I'm not sure why that is? - maybe that is because of the number of Spelling and Grammar Tsars over there who go around fixing everything? 🙂 Either way, reading a problem and its preferred solution is a treat on Stackoverflow (but I don't think that is a good media for discussion).Personally I prefer modern forums software, like Xenoforo (Discourse has some of these features too). WYSIWYG AJAX editors, highlight text in any post for a "quote this" button, drafts are saved frequently so you never lose a post, ability to "follow" posts and see lists of what you are following with replies that you have not read; it remembers where you have got to in each thread, the thread updates in real time if someone else posts to it (here, if you press QUOTE and if someone else has posted to the thread since you started reading it you get the QUOTE text from a completely different post 🙁 ). Separately is a list of new posts (that you are not following). You can tune-out of Categories which are not of interest, which makes the New Posts list more worthwhile. SPAM is almost unheard of (and a "valued member" [e.g. with high post count] flagging it means it is suppressed for others [unless moderated as "not spam"]) and so on and so on. And importantly the formatting is markUP rather than markDOWN 🙂 A joy to use IMHO.
Thanks for the note. A couple of comments.
First, I agree on Discourse and markdown. I think many developers are used to markdown when they work in some languages, so it's less of an issue for them. Personally I agree with you that I'd prefer WYSIWYG type editing. We've asked for that a few times, but the forum overhaul is substantial here.
Apart from the editor, and notifications (which aren't as clean as Xenoforo), what's better there? I see the editor as similar, but it doesn't have code editing that can be called out. We enhanced this forum to include code. Granted, we have some highlighting and cut/paste issues, but those are bugs. What fundamentally doesn't work or isn't usable.
If I read your post, there are a couple things:
- saving drafts
- proper quoting
- WYSIWYG editing.
I think Xenoforo is better overall, having spent 20 min playing, but not substantially different. I do like tags, which I have been asking for.
The email content thing is not likely to happen. As you noted, it does drive return visits, which is important. It also encourages more discussion if you see additional posts. We would like to change this to allow people to get notifications every hour or day, and get a consolidated list, rather than a new email for every post (though some like that).
In terms of the upgrades, it's not simple. Some of the profile stuff is embedded in the site and changing that is substantial work. There has to be some good reason. So many people use this forum and I almost never hear complaints, except from heavy users. I'm not discounting their complaints, but noting that the items are more niggling that appear to be annoying the more you use the site. Or for more frequent users. The majority of people never see the quote bug because they aren't on the site as often as others.
I'm not arguing against you; I'd just like some more context and debate here.