Enjoying reading forum

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Posted by Chris Murtland
Oct 28, 2020 at 11:19 PM

Hi Christoph,

I’ve actually started on a redesign of the site. The new version will look a little better (especially on mobile devices), but more importantly will include a lot of the features folks have asked for throughout the years, including the ability to edit your own posts and muting undesirable users.

Posted by Christoph
Oct 29, 2020 at 09:28 AM

Chris, that’s good news. Also thank you for providing and operating this website all the years, even though I’m only a rare visitor.

Before putting too much work into this, you should consider if it’s not easier to simply run a Discourse forum. It’s open source and completely free if you run it on your own server. It’s really powerful, modern and user-friendly, and I think it’s impossible to create such a great user experience with self-made software. But I don’t know how time-consuming installation, configuration and operating a Discourse forum actually is. Maybe too much. Anyway, maybe you should consider it and try it out.

Posted by Drewster
Oct 29, 2020 at 11:49 AM

I would have to agree that Discourse is awesome and I would be happy to see it used here as well.

I also agree about the thread regarding TheBrain. A good topic, but the thread was destroyed by a certain poster.

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 29, 2020 at 12:49 PM

I would respectfully disagree with the suggestions to move this forum to some other platform or even with the need for any major changes or new features.

I think the success and longevity of this site is down to a large extent to its simplicity.

People don’t have to be registered users to be able to read it and it has good visibility in search engines.

Sure, you could always try to move this to another platform such as Reddit or Discourse or whatever, but there is a danger that a lot of the existing users wouldn’t bother or want to re-register for those sites, and search engine visibility may disappear (I don’t remember ever landing on a Discourse site as the result of a Google search).

I follow this forum via an RSS feed and that works for me very well.

Maybe I’m just very old school (though I do visit some Reddit forums and have checked out Discourse).

But I recall when there was the request to split this forum, and then http://www.mypersonalproductivity.com/ was created, and I can see the last post on that was in 2012, so the same could happen when moved to Discourse etc.

Just my 2 cents…

Posted by washere
Oct 29, 2020 at 01:15 PM

I love Discourse since it started and improved greatly.

But I agree with the doc.

Plus, the archaic character of the forum as is, I find wonderful. I wouldn’t redesign it at all. It’s a classic and will stand out in time. The couple of changes Chris mentioned should be ok though if the look remains.

Any porting to new platforms, etc would in effect take the ownership and dominance in the field away from Chris just like previous talk here of starting parallel forums would.

I might not have time or inclination due to several reasons to post here anymore soon, but would like to read with the current look and format as I’m sure the silent majority I’ll join do as readers.

Thanks & Best wishes.

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