This forum has an amazing community and a wealth of information in it, but it's pretty hard to find the good stuff and separate it from the noise.
- For example, there's no way to "Like" a post.
- No way to bookmark posts
- Long threads can't be summarized
- The OP can't edit their initial post, so you have to wade through a 20-page thread to get to the stuff you're looking for
- The search function sucks enough that I prefer to use Google Site Search, which is awkward
- The mobile experience looks like this:
- You can't upload images and we force users to go through 3rd party sites
That's no wonder - this forum runs on an engine called SimpleMachines, which was built
in 2001 (!). Almost 20 years ago. And it hasn't evolved much.
The good news is there's a much better forum engine out there called Discourse
https://www.discourse.org/It's open source and built by the people behind the Internet's #1 Q&A site for programmers (StackOverflow) and it has
all the features we need - basically it solves every single bullet item I listed above.
- ♥ posts
- Bookmark posts
- Summarize long automatically!
- The OP can edit their initial post, so all the juicy info can be in one place. They can anser FAQs there etc.
- Search works really well
- The mobile experience is amazing
- You can simply upload them from your computer or even paste them from the clipboard
- Great antispam and moderation tools
Another piece of good news is that I've been maintaining a large forum (a bit similar to this actually) since 2011 and I migrated it to Discourse a couple years back, so I can do this migration for us. There's a
migration script already and a
helpful community around it.
Mods, please PM me. I know you've been
absent, but let's get us a nice-looking modern forum - it will help shed the stigma around CLL and it will make everyone's life easier.
Author
Topic: Who wants this forum upgraded? (Read 5153 times)