Features of the new forum

Meta
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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
1 Like
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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?

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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:

Pasted image1002×306 21.6 KB

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

Pasted image831×284 21.7 KB

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.

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Ah, great to know! Thanks Dan.

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

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