I would show a few cached pinned posts during loading by default; much more interesting than watching those balls.
Certainly most sites have a few pinned posts lying around.
That would be difficult as the forum isn’t loaded yet, but it is in the process of being loaded. Just possibly a static image could be displayed, but it would need to have been prepared and ready.
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Yes, e.g, for this Meta site the automatically ready to go “false teeth” splash page would look like
(I made it by opening the homepage in an incognito browser window. But Discourse could generate them nightly, and insert them at the beginning of the javascript that loads upon initial connection. So no site admin need be involved. No matter which of the million Discourse sites we are talking about.)
By the time the user stops marveling at its beauty and finds out the buttons don’t actually work, and s/he is just staring at a .JPG, well, by that time the site has perhaps already loaded and, well, with a short attention span they have already forgotten our ruse.
But actually there’s no reason to just load a .JPG when real .HTML could be sent to the user’s browser. And OK, they press a link. Well then treat that as a normal HTML request… etc.
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You’d need to generate so many images, for every single theme, and a lot of resolutions.
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Additionally, themes may include data that’s user-specific or dynamic in that section, and requiring every Discourse instance to be accompanied by a reasonably modern web browser would cause issues
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