Sponge XenForo

No. That’s an incredibly bad idea .

I suddenly like Discourse even more now.

I love Enjin because of its integration with minecraft but this seems like a nice software for this type of project.

I enjoy the basic minilistic aproach we here over xenforo’s.
Formatting isn’t a problem and personally I prefer markdown (which is much easier to adjust and read) than bb codes (with an annoying amount of square brackets)
Oh and the formatting buttons drive me mad when I am trying to get a long post together properly, to the point where I just write it up in bb code, it makes the whole thing just seem so much neater to me if I ever need to change it.

Whilst we are talking about formatting: I don’t think everyone deserves formatting tools. A lot of people will inaporitally do large bold red text in titles, and notices and it can drive me mad.

I’ve grown to like Discourse more than XenForo, because it is the future, basically. It’s much cleaner and nicer to look at.

Although I really like Xenforo, I’ve found that Discourse is much more convenient to use, and it has so many features I never even knew I missed! I am astounded by how well it works, and it’s so efficient in terms of ease of use. Being mobile friendly is also a very big plus.

P.S. The Sponge forums is the first time I have ever seen/used Discourse, and I’m very happy to use it.

Im liking discourse. it feels like a better version of esotalk in someways. It also has some really cool features like the summarize button at the beginning of each thread that filters the top rated comments. Overall liking it a lot.

I guess I am warming up to it. For some reason XenForo still feels a little more professional, IDK why, don’t ask me.

Not sure if I’m just beating the horse on this one or if it’s even going to make a difference, but there are multiple reasons as to why I think XenForo would be a better forum board than Discourse.

For one, I believe Discourse is set up more like a social network such as Twitter than an actual forum board. In my opinion, this makes it difficult to easily distribute important news outside of whatever is the latest sticky post. I think for the long run, this will be a disadvantage for the project because if this does indeed end up becoming the new Minecraft software, being able to share updates and easily access all different kinds of news is more of a challenge. In my opinion, Discourse is not the forum software suitable for large user bases, and its “intuitiveness” is corrupted by its lack of features for power users.

Perhaps the trend in software around the world to sacrifice functionality and features for “looking pretty” and “being smooth” transcends just Discourse, but it is a factor that repels power users such as myself who seek a little more than Discourse offers.

Additionally, there is always the argument that XenForo “isn’t unique” because so many people use it. But on the contrary, it is easy to acquire any number of different styles to theme and design the forums to be unique and different from any other forum board. If purchasing a paid style is out of the budget, then I am sure a free one with a few theme-specific modifications would suffice and still provide a very unique design as compared to most XenForo sites.

Here’s what it comes down to for me. When I heard that the Sponge Forums were publicly released, I was very excited to become a part of the community and be an active member on the forums. However, the choice in forum software repels me as I find it difficult to navigate and too “simple”. I don’t think Discourse is the best forum software for the long run, and I think it will continue to repel other users across the Minecraft community.

It’s not a matter of being scared of change – it’s that using Discourse is quite literally not an enjoyable experience.

Why? Because it defaults (this is configurable by the way) to showing all topics instead of showing a list of subforums? You do realize that XenForo has freaking status updates, right? I’d say XF is far closer to Twitter than Discourse will ever be.

Perhaps because a forum is not a blog.

Wat? Any examples or are you just going to call it empty names?

What is it that you want that Discourse doesn’t offer? Did you look up Markdown before complaining?

Do you have any substantial factual complaints, or are you just going to keep making baseless claims?

Discourse is WAY better than traditional forum software, it just needs a better style sheet.

[quote=“teozkr, post:131, topic:1218”]
Why? Because it defaults (this is configurable by the way) to showing all topics instead of showing a list of subforums? You do realize that XenForo has freaking status updates, right? I’d say XF is far closer to Twitter than Discourse will ever be.[/quote]
I realize that you can still view a list of subforums in Discourse; I just believe that the way in which it is laid out is not the most ideal, and from a user’s perspective, it is a turn-off for me. While XF may have status updates, the layout isn’t as difficult to navigate as I think Discourse is.

[quote=“teozkr, post:131, topic:1218”]
Perhaps because a forum is not a blog.[/quote]
Nor did I ever claim it to be? But for a project like Sponge, the diffusion of important information is going to be vital for a project such as this, especially if there should ever be a game-changing update that server owners and developers would need to see, or if there was a security issue that needed prompt attention.

[quote=“teozkr, post:131, topic:1218”]
Wat? Any examples or are you just going to call it empty names?[/quote]
I think the layout of threads is difficult as the lack of pages feels counter-intuitive to me, and seems like information overload. The thing that mainly frustrates me is how only recent and relevant threads seem to be promoted. Older threads that might have valuable content are easily lost in this layout, and I think this could be an issue with important information that might affect some users.

[quote=“teozkr, post:131, topic:1218”]
Do you have any substantial factual complaints, or are you just going to keep making baseless claims?[/quote]
I don’t know how you want me to make “factual” complaints based on an opinion of how I perceive Discourse. Your entire response was worded quite venomously, and it seems like no matter what my opinion or logic is, you’re going to berate me anyways about how ridiculous it is that I don’t like Discourse.

Once again, how is this at all different from literally any other forum software on the face of earth?

XenForo looks exactly the same there, as does SMF, phpBB, nodeBB, …

I can’t help but notice you’ve been quite aggressive towards anyone who dares oppose your opinion.

Anyway, I do agree with you on that point that most forum software promotes like jflory said.

Just hit / ( ? without shift ) and it will open up the search at the top. it searches both within the post, and within other thread (threadNames and posts) for more, hit ? ( with shift ).

I don’t know if it’s just because of the current theme, but to me, Discourse looks like something I would expect to see after 2 hours of “My First Website” HTML tutorials. What annoys me the most is that disgustingly neon-green bar at the bottom that shows me how many times I will have to scroll to the “bottom”, just to have another set of posts chunkily loaded into the page. Before anyone tries to defend the chunky loading with “but you would also have to click on the next page to get to the next posts on other forums software”, realize that from a user experience perspective, scrolling up or down a page has a significantly lower “expected delay” than clicking a button at the bottom of a page to get to a new one. Discourse has a lot of usability issues because of how “traditional” forum software works, which is what a lot of people are used to. Saying that people “should just stop being stuck in their old ways” is a very poor argument in the given context - it’s a community forum after all.

The mindless “defense” of Discourse is worrying to me, because it shows that proponents are completely incapable of understanding the perspectives of the nay-sayers. If someone says “this is missing” or “this isn’t as good”, it does, indeed, not necessarily mean that said feature isn’t there or isn’t as powerful, but the fact that someone has had trouble finding it or understanding it is not equivalent to them being an idiot. Perhaps said feature could be more visible, or perhaps it could be more intuitive or better described. Alas, XenForo has a lot of issues as well, one being that it is massively bloated.

Unfortunately, the developer claiming that something is user-friendly has a lot less merit than the user claiming it isn’t. The word user in user-friendly sort of gives the weighting away. Of course, there is a learning period involved with every “new thing”, but sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “la-la-la Discourse is awesome” is exactly as detrimental to the atmosphere as “la-la-la I hate Discourse and want XenForo back”.

This is an attitude I see a lot in the Sponge community, and it is extremely dangerous. Realize that Bukkit lived for a very long time, and would have continued to live for even longer, sans current circumstances. There is a reason for that, and it’s that Bukkit did something right. Underestimating or overlooking that something (or the many somethings) is probably the dumbest thing you can do when creating a successor. Staying away from “stuff Bukkit did” just because Bukkit did it is irrational the moment you give it second thought. I wish more doomsayers would understand that.

@garbagemule summed up everything I was trying to say in that paragraph. I think these are the biggest problems with Discourse, and it is because of the way it is set up and appears that I personally believe Sponge would be better using a “traditional” forum software in terms of scalability, as I foresee potential issues with new users becoming a part of the community because of the frustrations caused by Discourse.

Sure, XenForo may not be the exact answer, but I don’t believe the type of forum Discourse creates is suitable for a communtity of this expected magnitude.

Sure, but the delay is exactly as low as you’d expect (and even further from traditional paging than usual) if you’re actually reading the replies.

I disagree. I expect zero delay when scrolling up or down on a page. The dynamic loading would, ideally, happen without the user even noticing anything, but it only happens when you get to the “bottom”, in which case, scrolling halts, and you have to wait. Sometimes, you are not opening a thread to read it from start to finish, or you may want to scroll up or down some amount of posts, and doing so results in the unfriendly, chunky, choppy experience best described as “lagging”. Like I said, the expected delay of scrolling a page is significantly lower (close to zero) than the expected delay of clicking a “next” button at the bottom of a fully loaded page. This is interaction design 101 - when it comes to user experience, it doesn’t really matter what is actually faster or what you think is “better” for the user. What matters is what the user experiences, hence the name of the term.

Couldn’t agree more with the stated and with the way expressed.
Kudos!

…And… finally, to see someone else who shares the perspective on this topic while focusing on the well being of everyone here, not only on themselves individually.