Today is the 3 month anniversary since we migrated servers and forum software! I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone. It wasn’t perfectly smooth, but overall I think the forum is in a good state now. Activity continues to pick up, and spam is infrequent!
Do you have any feedback? Any issues you think we’ve missed? Do let us know in this topic.
These issues are still on my to-do list, so don’t think I’ve forgotten about them:
Update the COC, TOS
Change the unread page to include new topics (fix is incoming)
And I’m still planning for how to make a paginated mode
Speaking only for myself, of course, I really like the new site. I mentioned before that my favorite feature is the Dark Mode. I quickly got used to how it all works. I dig it more than the last place.
Great job!
I still don’t like it very much. Sure, I log in and read things and even managed to reply the other day but I still have the nagging feeling that I am missing posts. I can’t find items later that I have read because everything is lumped together. Haven’t worked out how to search for something yet so I have to scroll through reams of pages of posts to find something I am after.
In my mind, this forum has gone from reasonable to worse. Surely there were other ways to fix the old one or update it without changing EVERYTHING.
The Latest tab is pretty consistent about listing every new post. Topics that are fully read are dimmed or greyed in most theme settings.
Click the three dots under any post and the menu will expand. There is a bookmark button that will keep any post you mark under the Bookmarks tab.
Also, the search tool in Discourse is pretty damn good. After you search you’ll get more filter options, and if you know about when the item was posted you can narrow the search, for example, to the past few days.
Of course, searching for a common word like Inform is less than helpful, so try to include multiple words in your search.
You can also go to https://intfiction.org/read which lists all the topics you’ve read. There’s no link in the top menu because it’s not particularly useful IMO, but it is there if you need it.
An update was essential. The old system had become very unreliable and was non-functional much of the time. This system works well and is always available. The management team has done an excellent job moving the forum into the future based upon available technology. Forum management is a very difficult task and this forum (Intfiction) is one of the few quality forums available.
This shows a year, the general trend is up. The big spikes are when we announced the migration at the end of 2018 and at the end of February when it happened:
Another shocking thing the Discourse software metrics show us (based on the pre-migration data we imported) - we were getting bot signups in the hundreds every day toward the end and that stopped instantly with the new software.
The bulk of these were created but never actually made a first post so we were never aware of them. I hypothesize that the goal with these was to include spam URLs in the profile that perhaps were available for web crawlers to index. Discourse limits new-user links until it is established they are actually reading and participating in the forum.
Also note one of the advanced search filters lets you filter your search only to posts you have read, which is more useful filtering out 10+ years of archived data.
