Unfortunately I had to pull the plug

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@eesty thank you so much for posting feedback here, it certainly helps us.

I did want to quickly address the various points here:

@eesty

A large portion of my user base did not like infinite scrolling. To me it makes sense, but the types of topics on my forum may go on for up to 20,000 posts. I guess you can’t teach on old dog new tricks.

This pops up from time to time. A very strong position we have held ever since the project started is that “we will not add pagination”. At a fundamental level, if pagination is a must then Discourse is not a good fit.

Improving the experience though is on the table, things like allowing users to see bookmarks in the timeline, and fancier timeline controls are things we think about.

@eesty

One-click quoting, something which every other platform can do, is three-click process in Discourse. My users read a post, then want to have a “quote” button that loads the quote in a composer, simple. Yes Discourse can “quote” but it takes a few clicks and my users did NOT like this at all.

Though we will certainly not be adding this to core, amending post actions is completely doable in a theme component if you must. But keep in mind there is an aspect of “we must have MacDonalds” OK… “here is your unhealthy hamburger” to this.

@eesty

Being a large forum with many users having over 20,000 posts, these users constantly hit 502 errors. Why? Well I never quite figured it out, but it seems that Discourse hasn’t quite refined the backend DB queries to handle users with a large history. When ever one of these large users tried to post, start a topic or do anything really, then they would just hang and crash out. Considering these are the influencers of the community, I couldn’t dismiss their complaints.

This is something we do work on a lot (and did work on for our current release). It is hard to provide the huge amount of features Discourse has on offer with a very tight performance budget. We try to though, and we definitely made some improvements in the “user with tons of posts” department. @tgxworld even worked on the “giant topic” problem a bit a few month back.

There is a fundamental issue though, to get all the features Discourse has you are going to need more server resources than traditional dead simple php forums.

@eesty

Finally, revenue. I’ve run Adsense on my community for years and it’s helped offset the server and time costs. Since switching to Discourse my revenue instantly plummeted, down 90%. I gave it a month, I even used AdManager to try to improve things, but nothing was improving and it was burning a hole in my pocket. Be it Ads not showing, impressions plummeting or whatever, it couldn’t go on.
Further, the official discourse ad manager plugin bug on Mobile (screen jumping around) was driving my users away. In my opinion the official ad manager plugin should be pulled back to Beta until this critical issue is resolved.

@neil recently spent a fair amount of time on this ad problems, I would be very curious for any specific reproducible issues. We want to improve this.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I absolutely understand you, when a post already has a quote on it/multiple quotes it can get really big.

Glad to hear it, there are some really pathological quoting behaviors on old platforms and those were absolutely enabled by bad tooling.

So for someone to say, “hey man, we really need those bad quoting tools again…” I’m like … uhhh… no? No you don’t?

[Merlls_Rizzini]

Yes, I agree with you.

What are your thoughts on this post? Do you think It be possible to replicate it with a custom plugin?

Unfortunately I had to pull the plug

Yes, those features are very useful. But they require a) the user to be aware of them and b) clicking to reveal the context Late replies without quoting can make a topic can look confusing to the layman. Example (the “yes me” in the below topic, which references a post made earlier in the topic): [Screenshot%20from%202019-05-12%2023-42-02] I’d suggest Discourse should have auto-quoted the “yes me” post, but avoided auto-quoting the “count me in too Chris”, as this reply came soon after its …

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

What is there to replicate? Click the in-reply-to, and that will expand the post that it was in reply to.

[orangeandblack5]

Hard agree - the automatic removal of an entire previous post alone has probably saved me many hours.

[Merlls_Rizzini]

What is there to replicate? Click the in-reply-to, and that will expand the post that it was in reply to.

I know, its a cool feature, but if the quote automatically goes on post that are replying old/early posts on the topic, clicking it would be needed, its right there on you face, its seems more fluid for some. Getting redirected on mobile to the reply by clicking on member’s avatars wouldn’t be needed too.

Anyway, sorry for bothering you guys.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Right, on mobile it’s kinda bad because we don’t offer that functionality cc @sam but maybe we should start…

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I would like us to experiment with “collapse stream” implementation for mobile that shows “11 hidden posts” and then the reply you are digging up on click.

[orangeandblack5]

That would be so good

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

@eesty

Further, the official discourse ad manager plugin bug on Mobile (screen jumping around) was driving my users away. In my opinion the official ad manager plugin should be pulled back to Beta until this critical issue is resolved.

This bug should be fixed as of today. Fix here. The fix is in discourse, not the plugin.

As for the problem of AdSense showing blank ads, it’s hard to diagnose this problem. When you watch the network requests in the browser dev tools, do you see a lot of failed requests to a google domain (status 400)? If you see the requests, then the plugin is doing its job. The bad response from Google can mean that an ad unit defined in AdSense hasn’t become “live” yet. Or maybe these are units you had live on a different site, and aren’t happy being reused on a different site? Or ad units you used in your Discourse settings aren’t defined in your AdSense account. If you’re using Ad Manager, there’s a debug mode you can enable to see more info about each ad unit.

[rmc (Richard)]

I count a single click:

It’s two when you click the quote button though, maybe if you could hold a key and select to quote on release that would feel faster to some?

[Gunnar (Gunnar Helliesen)]

Just to provide a counter-point, for any future readers of this thread:

When we moved our community to Discourse in November of 2016, we had ~110,000 registered users and close to 2 million posts. The old forum was at that point exactly 20 years old, and had been running on the same home-grown software the whole time (with incremental fixes as we went along, of course).

Our community is one of Jaguar car enthusiasts. The type that will argue for months over the correct color of the sticker inside the factory tool kit bag for a 1961 E-Type OTS. You know, people who care about the important things in life.

Needless to say, the differences between our 20 year old cottage industry forum software and Discourse were dramatic. Of course we had complaints, and yes, contributions slowed for a while (we’re based on voluntary contributions, not ads). But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

One of the things we did was to set up a “demo” Discourse site in parallel with the old site, and import about a month’s worth of traffic into it, so it didn’t look too much like an empty mockup. Then we invited our users to log on to the demo site, play around with it, and give us feedback. I think that step alone saved us a lot of misery.

We also had a volunteer (now one of our moderators) play around with Discourse before we went live, and then be on hand to answer questions from those who just couldn’t figure out how to use the new software. Lo and behold, after a few months, the complaints had ceased and the contributions were back up to their old level.

Of course, your community could be very different from mine, I have no idea. I’m just saying that it is possible to get a community of mostly grumpy old men, all of whom are averse to change, and most of whom wouldn’t know the difference between a modem and a modal dialog box, to get comfortable with Discourse. In fact, I think now they enjoy it. Not only that, but we’re growing again as a community, after having stagnated for years.

So, it is possible to have a successful transition to Discourse, but it may require some planning. Also, getting feedback from the community before making the plunge can be crucial.

Gunnar

Jag-lovers Forums

[Stranik (Evgeny)]

I will try to write using the translator. IMHO, it’s not even in the technical details. The number of clicks when tsetirovanii there, I think this stuff. The main thing is that people are very difficult to rebuild. We in Russia have a question and answer site https://otvet.mail.ru/ is not even a Q & A site, but it is more used for communication. He is terrible. But people do not want to change anything. They will “continue to eat cactus, cry, but continue to eat” and remain on the old software, which is absolutely not convenient.

This is inconvenient, but people will still be there. This is what I encountered. Apparently we need more time and more efforts to promote Duscourse, so that more users would understand the obvious things.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@eesty

Being a large forum with many users having over 20,000 posts, these users constantly hit 502 errors. Why? Well I never quite figured it out, but it seems that Discourse hasn’t quite refined the backend DB queries to handle users with a large history. When ever one of these large users tried to post, start a topic or do anything really, then they would just hang and crash out. Considering these are the influencers of the community, I couldn’t dismiss their complaints.

I really do feel this was the most technically actionable of the issues raised. It’s too bad we couldn’t help you drill into this bit. It’s surely incredibly frustrating if you keep encountering errors as you use the site every day.

[Blumiere]

Even if pagination is against the intended design of Discourse, it would be appreciated for many I think to have a means of easily navigating through very large threads or digesting them in more than one sitting. The post scrollbar is convenient for most threads but post numbers and dates become indecipherable noise in very large threads. “Page 75” is a lot more useful than “Post 1,512”. Introducing post units somehow in very large threads would help a lot with navigation and mental bookmarking.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

So press the # key and jump to any post number (or time) you want…

[tgxworld (Alan Tan)]

“Page 75” is a lot more useful than “Post 1,512”.

Page 75 and Post 1,512 doesn’t provide any useful information actually. On the scrollbar, we provide a close estimate of the date for the nearest post which I think is much more valuable when scrolling through a topic.

[TheBestPessimist]

“Page 75” is a lot more useful than “Post 1,512”

I would like to say au contraire! Imo having someone say just look 2 pages back or the answer is on page 72, the third or fourth post is a misleading advice, since most of the paginated sites and forums will let the user customize how many posts per page are shown.

2 pages back @ 100 posts per page is totally not the same as 2 pages back when having 20.

I am 100% in favor of saying “post 6666” which can be interpreted as exactly/specifically that one post no matter what pagination or lack thereof is used. I have met this these stupid “situations” so many times (eg. on xda, snbforums, or ahk boards) and having in discourse only a single way to address the posts feels like a very big improvement.

The sidebar on the … side… helps with this navigation even more, as it’s so easy to search for the post i desire.

(i did give this advice, although maybe in a different form to multiple persons arguing that having infinite scroll is a stupid and bad idea, after asking them to look 2 a few pages back for something – i always use the highest number of posts per page, while most people don’t even know there’s a setting for that)

[Stephen]

I think to have a means of easily navigating through very large threads or digesting them in more than one sitting.

I’ve been following this topic for days. Each time I return Discourse uses my read progress and brings me back to the post I last read. I can’t imagine anything easier that “takes care of it for you”.

The great news is that if the team finds something even more intuitive, they’ll probably implement it.

[DoMiN8ToR]

Unfortunately I have been in the same boat. I had an old community which started in 1999. Started with BBForum software, then migrated to Vbulletin till it became too big to upgrade in a timely matter.

The Discourse team was incredible in their help of converting the forum from Vbulletin to Discourse. But once running, older forum users easily got annoyed, despite us pointing out the useful features of the software.

Even worse, revenue declined terribly, only 30% of ad revenue was left after the migration.

For a new community I would not hesitate to use Discourse, for an old community you should carefully consider whether Discourse would be a good fit.

Many people simply don’t like change and a forum is just a hobby for them, so they don’t want to spent much energy on learning new things. Others will embrace Discourse and never switch to anything else.