Did you consider moving community forums to discourse?
The current version of the forum is quite painfull to use and has a lot less features than discourse, like:
- load post from scrolling,
- summarize topic,
- efficient navigation into topic,
- nice code formatting,
- ...
It would be a nice move.
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We have been migrating our forums from a few other legacy systems back in the 2015 year, and back then we have decided to migrate all the product-related forums to Zendesk which we already have been using as a support platform (except Kotlin which has been migrated to Discourse.)
There have been various business reasons for that, and as of the 2015 year analysis, it would be very hard for us to move more than 500,000 messages we had in the history of our community forums, to Discourse. The situation might be very different these days, as more than four years passed already and we see that Discourse is growing in the popularity a lot.
So far I'm not sure that the benefits of changing the platform would outweigh the costs and an effort of the migration process. We are working with Zendesk on some of the issues on these forums and would appreciate if you share more feedback on the most annoying issues with us.
Thanks!
Anything that allows better search and markdown in comments would be good. However, history will be lost.
I didn't mean to replace the existing forum but to migrate it and keep all the current posts.
See https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrating-to-discourse-from-another-forum-software/16616 and https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/script/import_scripts
Mikhail, from my perspective I don’t really care which forum software is used as long as it supports easy comment creation with ability to include code without it being mangled. Here is my list of pet peeves/must haves:
Control the font size in comment text area. Right now the submitted comment font is huge compared to the microscopic text being typed. Using browser zoom you either get readable text while typing with huge comments or normal comments with tiny text while typing. Also can the same font be used for both to eliminate having to adjust between the two drastically different fonts:
Can we get a bit more contrast for the comment text. The size is fine but the light grey is a bit too light making it harder to read than on other sites, this one is from YouTrack:
Preview before submit. Plenty of times I submit and have to edit the comment, probably because the tiny font addressed in 2 makes proofreading comments difficult. It would be easier if there was a preview before commit.
Increase the size of the comment text area. It is a postage stamp. Ideally it should be resizable so you can see more of the comment you are writing.
Ability to paste complete comments instead of typing them into the browser.
One of the main reasons is that it is easier to put together a complete reply with code samples, references and inline markup by doing it in the IDE where the code resides. Pasting the final complete comment here.
The other, is that in the past, when taking a while to complete a comment because I was pulling all the relevant information together, resulted in the session expiring or other glitches causing complete loss of fairly extensive reply to be lost. At which point my desire to repeat the exercise would disappear and I did not bother replying.
I added options to my Markdown plugin to generate HTML which can be pasted into comments here preserving all formatting except pasted HTML looses spaces between inline markup, splicing the words together and making reading the result harder.
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360002940160-These-Forums-have-a-problem-with-the-code-converting-pasted-HTML-text-to-HTML-in-the-comment
Of course having Markdown supported in comments would be ideal and would match what we are all used to using on YouTrack, GitHub, etc.
It’s hard to indicate the most annoying issues. It’s a lot of issues that make the global experience completely different. It’s like when I was convincing people more than 10 years ago to switch from eclipse to Intellij. It’s a lot of small differences. The size of the lines, the notifications, the quality of edition and navigation, …
I created a forum based on discourse few years ago, and it’s incredible to see how much time people spend on it. I think it’s not completely the same with Kotlin forum because a lot of users are using slack. But even if slack is very good, a lot of good conversations are rapidly missed (which is bad). On discourse you can see subjects that last few years without problem.