- Joined
- Jan 14, 2004
- Messages
- 741
The Straight Dope Message Board is a "legacy forum" -- online for over 20 years, and one of the longest-established big boards. After starting off with UBB, the site switched to vBulletin a few years later. It's been running nearly stock vB 3.8.7 for close to a decade. Over the past two decades, the SDMB earned a reputation among its loyal member base for constant technical problems. In recent months, a typical visit to the SDMB will involve long page loading times, timeouts, crashes, and the like. 22,000,000 posts and shared Web hosting through Google is now pushing vB3 past its breaking point.
The SDMB has an self-described "intellectual" culture, one that is collectively very, very resistant to "bells and whistles" and change. Its member base is dominated by older "bookish" Boomers and Xers. The SDMB just implemented avatars a few years ago -- small 50 x 50 icons -- over the objections of many long time users. There's no inline images or videos. The post editing window is five minutes. There's only a small set of old smileys. Users frown on posting using Unicode-based emojis. Management takes pride in being "late adopters". The SDMB looks and feels like something straight out of the pre-Web 2.0 era, and many want to keep it that way.
Yesterday, the board administrator announced that the SDMB would finally be ditching vBulletin 3, and moving to Discourse. Not an easy move to XenForo or IP.Boards, not an upgrade to vBulletin 5 that one would expect on a site where change is feared. Discourse.
Your thoughts? Do you know of any other big boards that moved to Discourse? Is the SDMB making the right decision?
The SDMB has an self-described "intellectual" culture, one that is collectively very, very resistant to "bells and whistles" and change. Its member base is dominated by older "bookish" Boomers and Xers. The SDMB just implemented avatars a few years ago -- small 50 x 50 icons -- over the objections of many long time users. There's no inline images or videos. The post editing window is five minutes. There's only a small set of old smileys. Users frown on posting using Unicode-based emojis. Management takes pride in being "late adopters". The SDMB looks and feels like something straight out of the pre-Web 2.0 era, and many want to keep it that way.
Yesterday, the board administrator announced that the SDMB would finally be ditching vBulletin 3, and moving to Discourse. Not an easy move to XenForo or IP.Boards, not an upgrade to vBulletin 5 that one would expect on a site where change is feared. Discourse.
Your thoughts? Do you know of any other big boards that moved to Discourse? Is the SDMB making the right decision?
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