Yup, that’s why I thought we’d celebrate with a big launch. 
In all seriousness though, congratulations Lesley. Have a great day.
Off Topic:
Well, there’s no meat in Haggis so you should be ok. 
Since when? It’s made from a stomach and stuffed with sausage. Last time I checked, those count 
Off Topic:
Doesn’t mention anything about meat. (I was making a joke)
Unfortunately we’ve had to push launch out a week due to complications with the migration. We’re looking at Mon 8th Sept now.
I see, good luck on that. I personally aint a fan of Discourse, but I believe the staff have a reason to migrate. If so, I fully support the move.
Thanks. That’s a great attitude and it’s appreciated.
Anything in particular that you dislike?
And we do, lots of them! In fact, I’ve already submitted multiple PRs to Discourse to improve things from an accessibility standpoint, minor UI corrections, etc. That is one of the big benefits, is the staff (and community, for that matter) can improve the software.
So anything that isn’t well liked, can likely be changed (via a plugin, or the core code of Discourse).
I am secretly hoping it will be delayed forever. 
As for signature lines, I like them. Requiring 90 days membership or a certain number of posts is sufficient to prevent fluff posters. I will miss the signature lines.
StackOverflow sucks. I hope SitePoint will not turn into another StackOverflow where topics are locked because someone asked a similar question 3 years prior.
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SO is amazing for what it is and it isn’t a question and answer site, it’s a code/developer repository. It will be interesting to see where it goes in the near future now that a very large portion of issues have been asked and answered.
I hope SP doesn’t turn into SO as well. Though I think they have done some things right as far as rules for asking good questions and making good answers.
I’ve run a fairly popular (for what it is) (close to a million posts) vBulletin installation, and man is it feeling like a dinosaur compared to Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow, etc. There’s simply too much human moderation required, and the software encourages a kind of in-group feeling throughout the communities. A site like Reddit, on the other hand, gives users the power of the upvote, but does not foster much sense of community in comparison.
At any rate, IMVHO, software such as vBulletin, PHPBB, Invision, etc. urgently need to overcome their now decade-old view of community in order to remain relevant.
The Discourse software is written by the guys that wrote SO, but it is not SO. It is a totally different product. SitePoint will be SitePoint, but on a platform that functions better.
I don’t know how you guys are pulling in extra dollars but going from 15 sales to zero is not looking like an incentive.
“how you guys are pulling in extra dollars” – we aren’t. We’re posting for the love, for the passion, for the codez. Which is part of what makes Sitepoint… Sitepoint. Even with contributors here who are business(wo)men and can’t live on love and passion alone either. I enjoy visiting a forum like this. I come here for the free exchange of information and opinions.
I don’t come here to read sigs, and I don’t get sad when people leave because they can’t earn a living here at SitePoint (there are places/forums where you can… see DigitalPoint for example, very marketing driven).
All that said, when a poster interests me I too have sometimes looked at their signatures/profile pages. If in Discourse that’s as simple as clicking the poster’s avatar, I don’t see that as a barrier to anyone who has genuine interest in anything one might offer that’s paid, not at all.
I don’t see SitePoint as becoming like SO because SO explicitly says they are a question/answer site, and sometimes a code-review site, and NOT a discussion forum.
SitePoint is a discussion forum, specifically, so I don’t expect SO-style rules at the new SitePoint regarding content.
I’m so super curious what your search engine is for the forums? Something Lucene-based? Something else (Sphinx, Xapian…)? Is it changing in the switch to Discourse?
I saw a really cool thread on another forum (the forums DigitalPoint switched to) where Sean talked about trying out ElasticSearch vs Sphinx for his forums… and really, that would be an awesome blogpost/article for SitePoint if someone would write it.
Back in the day, a bot posted the latest SitePoint article in the forums. Sometimes there was commentary and sometimes there wasn’t.
I wonder if something is planned where a SitePoint article that’s rather in-line with the topics popular on the forums gets interesting comments, that it somehow get incorporated as a topic into the forums (but only if there are already comments)?
I also have a question about the flagging:
on SO, things people downvote doesn’t disappear entirely-- it either gets “folded” (this comment has too many negative votes) away with an opportunity to click it open anyway, or gets greyed out (harder to read). Either of these (but preferably the first) seem better than removing the post wholesale until someone changes it-- people might flag stuff for various reasons, and not always as a moderation tool.
Does the new SP flagging differentiate between “I disagree with this post”, “this post has bad/incorrect information”, and “this post is spammy” or “this post is cruel/attacking/inappropriate” etc?
It actually dims it, hides the content, and you can view the content by clicking a link “Show hidden content” or something along those lines. So it isn’t physically removed from the discussion, you do have the ability to see the community flagged it out and you can see the content which may indicate why they flagged it.
However, Staff may review the flags on the given post and physically delete it, if it is spam, not appropriate, etc.
Yes, there are 5 different flag notifications:
See the following illustration
https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-flagging-to-trigger-a-pm-also-cause-a-flag/18145/11?u=cpradio
Ah, nice link. Thanks.
Yes, I figured things could actually-actually be deleted at some point by a mod, was only concerned about the flagging… for example on reddit, some things get downvoted not because they don’t contribute to discussion, but because people want to express that they disagree with the post’s point. Etc. (sort of an anti-thanks).
Another thing that I’ve noticed from Twitter devs playing with things is that sometimes (not so much of forums maybe) it’s nice to have a “private flag” (on twitter called "favourite) which gives you your own list (when logged in) of things you wanted to get back to reading, or to remember someone posted a good link on topic X or whatever.
I saw there’s a heart symbol in Discourse but hearts and kidneys can mean so many different things (Dutch people might get that joke).
Discourse has that too. You can star topics and bookmark posts (at this current time), there are some who think it is crazy to have both options, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I use the star topic a lot on Meta (I don’t use the bookmark option).
Once the migration to Discourse has settled down, the plan is to link blog comments with the forums, thus integrating the forums with the posts on sitepoint.com. I’m not sure exactly how it will all work, but that’s certainly in the offing.