General forum software discussion

First up:

I've been fiddling around with site category hierarchy and displays. Drop by and see what you think.

fyi, the current default theme, Vincent, probably needs to get dropped. It's pre-loaded with over 2,000 lines of custom CSS, which makes it very difficult to add our own or use add-ons & plugins without breaking things. I've already run into problems.

I've changed opinions several times about how to handle customizing our site. The default theme and available color schemes should be fine, I think. I've actually been doing my changes on the blue one and pushing them to the others when I'm happy with it. Current opinion is we don't need much and I'm comfortable we can give users enough to make them happy without adopting somebody else's CSS mess or killing ourselves rolling our own.

So Jmakin has bowed out of project managment - at leat for now - I think.

I think we are on course to recommend Discourse.

I think we have a decision to make about AWS vs. nonAWS hosting.

Issues that I can think of are:

AWS costs more
AWS is technically more of a challenge
AWS is more flexible/reliable/easy to migrate with confidence and such

My opinion is the the cost matters. It might not now, but lower costs make for higher chances of success for the site. It may not be huge, but may just putter along with a few hundred users for a long time.

I don't mind the tech challenge, but I think it's important that pretty much everyone on the tech team understands pretty much how the site runs top to bottom so that they can probably fix stuff.

I think there's a good emerging way of making decisions where things can be done, but objections are either overcome and there's consensus, people who disagree with the majority agree to go along, or they block.

If everyone else on the tech team is cool with AWS I wouldn't block. If some people don't want it, I would because I think it really needs everyone to be willing to learn it.

There are still things that have to happen before the move, but I think if we could make a few decisions, it'd help move things along.

Dunno what thread is better.

The cost is one thing. The technical issue though? I have never touched AWS. Maybe it's all a piece of cake.

Loden? Big learning curve or we'll all pick it up easy and remember it in 2 years if we need to do something?

Cool. Under the circumstances I can't imagine anyone yelling at you for software settings and UI. If they do, fuck them. You have a way better sense of design than I do, so I'll give that excuse for not contributing more here. Also, it's hard for more than one person to be in the middle of changes like that. Imo, if we're pretty surely headed towards Discourse, and if there's any way it's possible to slice off some discrete part of what you're doing that won't conflict with something else you're doing, I, or one of the other people with admin on your site could try something out. I did see that you and goofy coordinated to get something done along those lines which was very cool.

I don't necessarily need more hands on with the stuff I'm fiddling with, I just want feedback and opinions about what I'm doing and the issues I bring to this thread.

If it's redundant, then let's not put it there. Ads would be an option if we don't have any useful content. The reading view needs some way to navigate to your next thing, and from what I've seen, it's not obvious. I go to the hamberder menu every time (edit: maybe I click on the notifications decoration sometimes). That's almost as bad as scrolling back to the top on this forum when switching threads. My preferred content for the right sidebar would be my unreads/favorites/watched, in some reasonable order, so that as I read, I see that I'm moving through my list. Get to the bottom of the current thread A, click on thread D, which has 6 new replies, get to the bottom of that, click on thread A, which has 1 new reply, then thread C, which has 3 new replies. Having those threads with new replies in the sidebar would be the fewest clicks to read all of those messages.

It's true there's really nowhere to go when you get to the end of a thread. I usually click the logo to get back to the front page. Definitely something that could be done better.

Side navigation on 2p2 is pretty useless, for one because there are a lot of subforums you don't care about, but also because it scrolls when you read a thread. With Discourse that ought to be able to float.

It's a web-wide problem. I'm always mashing the Home key on my keyboard to get the page back to where the useful links are. The navigation stuff we associate with the top of the page really should float at the bottom and always be accessible.

ProBoards has a lot of stuff. A lot of it is goofy, but there are like 350 plugins and they take like 30 seconds to install. If anyone wants to play War hit me up.  Eh, War is pretty boring.

Thanks!