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Why Discourse Is Exciting And Disappointing

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    "Discourse 2019: The Forum Of The Future". Sounds cool, right? Finally, we get to move from these clunky, awkward forums to something sleek and futuristic and elegant! Except...not.

    If you know me pretty well, you know I have a bane to pick with the new site, as I've been calling it for three years. It looks like an internet comments section, not a proper forum. The endless scrolling in particular is absolutely infuriating. So, when I heard we were moving to something new, I was excited. Discourse! Mentions, subscriptions, forum search! It seemed like a dream.

    Then, Adult NaNo switched to Discourse. It seemed fun at first. Then, it grew just as frustrating as the New Site forums. See, Discourse still has infinite scrolling, only instead of a "SHOW MORE POSTS" button, it has a little slider you can drag to the bottom. This is slightly better, but only just, as it still lags, glitches, and frustrates almost as much as our system. Plus, the likes and badges and trust levels, while enticing at first, really just make the whole thing feel cheap. Also, and this may be a matter of personal preference, but the whole thing has adopted the annoying amount of blue that the New Site has. Bring back the brown, I say! Thankfully, Discourse has a theme system, so maybe that will be more easily worked around.

    Were I in charge of picking out a new forum system, I'd use MyBB. I've worked with it myself in the past, and it's got almost all the things I like. PMs, pagination, forum search, and heavy customizability all come with the open source software, and though it doesn't have mentions out of the box, there's a plugin to fix it. There's A Plugin For That is practically the motto of MyBB. The only problem with it, I'd say, is that it runs on PHP, which is hard to work with. For that reason alone, I can understand why the developers chose Discourse. Still, I think there are better options.

    I'm still looking forward to the switch, if only a tiny bit. Mentions and subscriptions are very nice things to have, and if I have to have the absolute suck of infinite scrolling either way, I'll go with the one with extra useful features. But honestly? I don't know how long I'll stick around, regardless. All my friends are graduating soon, and few of them plan to migrate to the adult site. While I expect to be participating in NaNoWriMo for a while now, it might just be I'll drift away from the community, adult and teen alike. A good, cozy forum is very important to the atmosphere of NaNo, and Discourse just isn't that.

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