Features of the new forum

Dan_Dascalescu (Dan Dascalescu) 2015-10-15 02:34:43 UTC #1

The Quantified Self forum has been upgraded from MyBB to Discourse, a modern discussion platform with several important features:

actively developed by the team who created StackOverflow
very well thought out in terms of UX and community building
much better spam control
notification system, on the site and via email
live preview of the post as you type
contextual help onboarding the user
badges rewarding contributions to the community
tags in addition to categories
social login with Facebook, Twitter, GitHub
top users (by posts, topics, likes, visits etc.) are at https://forum.quantifiedself.com/users?period=all

Minor issues:

Discourse encourages usernames without spaces, in addition to the full name
the Markdown formatting is very simple and used on Slack, GitHub etc. but is not WYSIWYG

Welcome to the new QS Forum!

Agaricus (Gary Isaac Wolf) 2015-10-21 06:45:18 UTC #2

Thanks for this Migration! One feature that I don't understand is the "Activity" column. I thought this represented "most recent activity" but that doesn't seem to be the case, as topics are associated with labels like "2h" (which I'm reading as 2 Hours) when there hasn't been activity that recently in the topic, as far as I can tell. How does the Activity column work?

Dan_Dascalescu (Dan Dascalescu) 2015-10-21 06:56:05 UTC #3

The Activity column reflects the latest event in the topic, which means the latest event that affected any of the posts in the topic.

In this case, we're seeing a bunch of system edits like this one in this post:

If you click on the pen icon, you'll see the reason for the edit:

That edit is done by this automated script I wrote, which corrects formatting after the migration from the old forum. It processes about 500 messages per day, in order to not flood the authors of the posts with emails notifying them of this system edit.

We're now at post #3800 of 5700, so we'll see this kind of activity for the next 4 days. After this post-processing is done, the Activity column will only reflect real replies or edits.

Agaricus (Gary Isaac Wolf) 2015-10-21 07:57:06 UTC #4

Ah, great to know! Thanks Dan.

Dan_Dascalescu (Dan Dascalescu) 2015-10-27 19:56:15 UTC #5

The automated script finished running last week, and only genuine activity has been at the top for the past few days.

Dan_Dascalescu (Dan Dascalescu) 2016-02-16 00:08:48 UTC #6

5 posts were split to a new topic: Slack channel for QS