Hi Neil, hi project, thanks for putting effort in communication improvements, either on the social or on the technical level.
I'm a Discourse user on various instances, but I'm not an admin on any of them. This is my end-user experience: Good: - Discussions are usually well structured. It is easy to find start and end points. - Moderation or other means of filtering seem to work. At least, signal to noise ratio was always great. - Search function returns useful results most of the time. - "Like this post" is a nice, low-barrier form of acknowledgment. Bad: - Offline usage and local archive is hard, i.e. re-reading when disconnected, hold back a text, e.g. to think it over, is difficult. - I like to use the console. Discourse does not work with any console browser I tried, nor with eww. Reading is possible, login is not. - Entering any longer text in a web browser is a nuisance. Like many, I manually copy and paste between text editor and browser. - The web interface is too ponderous, too cluttered, too distracting for my taste or maybe for my age cohort. Ugly: - Badges. "Earned 'First Emoji'", "Earned 'Anniversary'". Is it only me? But I feel devalued and belittled by gamification. Note, that the "bad" points cannot, unfortunately, be mitigated by using the email interface instead of the web interface, because: - It does not represent the same content, i.e. some advantages are gone, and this leads to an information imbalance between users. - Discourse email is badly formatted and disrespects any rules one expects in a "real" email conversation, such as quoting. My personal and preliminary résumé is: "Something like Discourse would be great, but maybe better something else, esp. w/o gamification?" Sorry, this got longer than I wanted to.
