Enjoying reading forum

Posted by Christoph
Oct 29, 2020 at 01:43 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>I would respectfully disagree with the suggestions to move this forum to
>some other platform or even with the need for any major changes or new
>features.

Thanks for your feedback.

Actually I would not call this “moving”, just modernizing the forum software and making it more user friendly. The URL should not be changed.

>People don’t have to be registered users to be able to read it and it
>has good visibility in search engines.

The same holds true for Discourse forums.

> (I don’t remember ever landing on a Discourse site as the result of a Google search)

Maybe because most don’t have “discourse” in the URL. But try googling for e.g. “On the process of making MOCs” and you willl get a link to the Discourse forum for Obsidian which you can read without login. You can try this with any other comment on that forum, they are all indexed by Google. You will also notice how active people are on that forum. I attribute that not only to the excitement about Obsidian itself, but to some extend also to the great user experience when participating in that forum.

>I follow this forum via an RSS feed and that works for me very well.

Yes, I’m doing the same. Without RSS I would not be able to use this forum. But this results in me inevitably seeing all the discussions. In Discourse I can subscribe to individual categories or threads or mute individual threads.

However, I agree that changing the forum software too radically could alienate long-time users. The last thing I want is that people like you leave the forum because of that. And yes, there are always drawbacks of changing the software. You will probably have to re-register in order to be able to write. And the old forum postings would probably not be integrated and searchable in the new forum software, but maybe only made available in archived form. And it could simply be too much work to maintain the Discourse forum software and keep it up to date.