As a regular forum user on old & new Vassal and BGG, I have to say that I love Discourse. It is easy to find posts and very good for creating posts, including pasting in embedded graphics which is a luxury other forums require multiple steps for. Notifications and feedback (likes) are also well implemented. I wish that other forums I use could migrate!
By comparison, I also find ConSimWorld almost unusable. I don’t know what it is but I just cannot get a handle on it.
should have seen the original vassal forum - Yahoo user group! 
Did you work at CERN?
I’ve been online since Mosaic in 1993 and can’t take seriously anybody who mentions Discourse forum software in the same breath as CSW…
If you’re not familiar with it, any new software format may be viewed as worrisome. It took me a while to navigate around the new forum. But now that I know it, it’s a far cry better than what we were using and better than practically any other forum I’ve used.
I have to go with second-worst. I’ve gotten a little used to it, but my time actually looking through the forum for things to help with has crashed because it’s just hard to find the appropriate sections.
There’s a “Categories” button at the top of the forum’s front page, and all the categories are also available in the dropdown at the left.
Why does that make it hard to find the appropriate sections?
First off, you have to navigate to it. Which is okay, but I end up fumbling around looking for the button get to that each time.
Second, you get there, and it’s a split view without much space between them. So on one side, you see the sections, and on the other you see a bunch of miscellaneous topics, but it visually runs together, which is off-putting as you try to parse what one has to do with the other (nothing, but that’s not what it visually says).
Once you’re inside a section, things are better… but the button that tells you that you are in one is the least prominent thing on the page.
I don’t care about the Categories page at all myself—this is the first time in maybe six or eight months I’ve looked at it. Do any of the ways of setting it up discussed here appeal?
In the initial post, the third is the best. The second one runs into the same trouble as the first/current. If the two-column version proposed later actually exists that’d be worth a look.
I looks like we have quite a few options presently:
I’m posting screenshots of some of them below, since there’s no easy way for anyone else to see what they look like.
Having seen the options, are there any preferences among the three from the link and the four screenshots I posted?
I don’t normally ever use that page, but that being said, I’m leaning towards either “Boxes with Subcategories” or “Boxes with Featured Topics”; not sure if it’s better to see the category descriptions or the first few topics…
Is there a way to turn off the asinine notices about how long it’s been since a certain user has posted, etc.? I really don’t give a rat’s ass how long it’s been since someone has posted, or whether they’ve ever posted, or anything else of that sort. That is about the most retarded “feature” I’ve ever seen in forum software.
