A huge step backward--what are you guys thinking?

Did you guys look at Discourse (http://www.discourse.org) at all? I've been using it over at BoingBoing and it feels like a better platform.

I kicked the tires on one of discourse.org cited customer sites (https://forums.docker.com/) and the forum seemed rather friendly. It was a decent blend of current "best practices" use of white space and utility.

There is some sort of glitch in the edit process. I wanted to make a change in the above, immediately after submitting. Unfortunately, clicking on the edit link accomplished nothing. I then attempted to add another reply (this reply), but I could not submit anything. Finally, I used the breadcrumb link back to New community feedback, located the above post, and was able to edit. I don't know if this is in the mix, but I was ordering the Comments list by Newest first.

Did you guys look at Discourse (http://www.discourse.org) at all? I've been using it over at BoingBoing and it feels like a better platform.

I kicked the tires on one of discourse.org cited customer sites (https://forums.docker.com/) and the forum seemed rather friendly. It was a decent blend of current "best practices" use of white space and utility.
Good feel to the place. Some notables on the customer list.

It's threaded, not flat, but there seem to be a lot of filtering options to make it acceptable. I've opened an account and started a play in the sandbox. Nice WYSIWYG editor.

[quote=amun] there's no reason why we couldn't set up another user-driven site if we want to.
We'd lose the history, of course, but as long as enough of the 'old guard' were on board, it could work well.

That's an intriguing line of thinking. The Sonos user universe would not be the losers as long as they had an easy way to locate this from outside the Sonos site, and that is important because the idea is to give better service to all, not just those that were forum users. But short term, there would be an adverse effect if forum expertise does a mass exit.

The only people that would be really unhappy with this are Sonos managers that want to be masters of the universe.

The challenge is the housekeeping and keeping away the spammers.

short term, there would be an adverse effect if forum expertise does a mass exit.
The sense I'm getting is that a number have already headed for the door. The question then is how to best recapture their interest.

Did you guys look at Discourse (http://www.discourse.org) at all? I've been using it over at BoingBoing and it feels like a better platform.

Just had a /very/ quick look - still seems to have a lot of the kiddy facilities that put me off. Looks better than this, though.

The old forums system may have looked old fashioned, but it worked incredibly well... i.e. function over form

The challenge is the housekeeping and keeping away the spammers.

There would be a number of challenges - we'd be starting from scratch, after all...

However, it's all do-able, with sufficient will and support.

Yes BlueChrystalMan, I had one going to the error page, did a refresh/reload and presto, off I went to the actual thread. Good "trick"!

Too many workarounds to make this place usable. And still no text in the body of the message. Come on guys... enable the option... its a two second fix. If it doesn't have the option, then the sales rep for this software took you for a ride.

Is there any benefit from this platform compared to the one forum was on? Not counting the avatar/likes and other bells and whistles. There has got to be at least one substantive way how this platform serves the target user better than the old one - which is that? It can't be all negative surely - more than one would be nice of course.