Not at all. We’d love to hear your suggestions on that. But for those of us who’ve been around a while, there’s no doubt that the community is withering here. And those who’ve been around longer attest to how much more of a community it was years earlier. Nobody is expecting magical fixes. A move to a different platform will achieve nothing on its own, but it provides the foundations for building what we expect will be a better forum, which includes integrating a lot of the great things that the SitePoint network offers.
Yes, please keep bringing up concerns. I can’t say how refreshing it is to be able to see others with similar questions that we “staff” had as this idea was brought to our attention as well.
… and continue to have, indeed. 
Be assured, there’s no complacency here. There are lots of outstanding issues and feisty discussions going on, like this one, all in the spirit of making the forums as good as possible—things like functionality, accessibility, usability and a whole lot more. 
Sounds like the SitePoint is out of new projects for staff to work on and is embarking on a mission to throw money down the drain. From a development stand-point seems like the developers are sick of using PHP and are using this as an opportunity to try flashy ol’ ruby. I had a quick look at Discourse and to be honest I’m not really impressed. It is the same basic bare bone forum structure you can get anywhere else with a sprinkle of AJAX magic. Realistically it will probably take months if not a year or so truly customize it to offer the features that we are accustom to. I just really hope we aren’t left with that bare bone forum shown in the demo on launch. That product really seems more geared up to spinning up new forum deployment quickly. That seems to be one of the main advantages if it is actually true. Something like Proboards would than benefit much more than a single install like site point. I mean Sitepoint forums have already been configured and customized so the advantage of a small configuration goes down the tubes in my opinion. This is especially true since there would be a significant amount of customization required from a programmatic standpoint itself. I don’t really think using Discourse has any advantage for a single forum like Sitepoint. Especially a forum that has already been when through the trenches of hundreds of hours of customizations. To do it all over again seems like throwing money and resources to the wind for minimal gain. From a business standpoint I don’t see how using Discourse is going to provide much value, sorry besides perhaps being a featured as a migration project on the Discourse website and/or talks regarding the system. Which I guess provides some business value considering the target audience of the forums but enough to offset the costs of completely rebuilding this site, I guess that is for wigs to decide.
Hi ya,
Thanks for your feedback. There are a couple of points that I want to address to clear up any confusion.
We haven’t used PHP for quite some time. We’ve been a Rails house for the last few years. That is one of the benefits of Discourse for us – we have resource on hand.
You’ve hit the nail on the head a couple of times here. Firstly, it is those hundreds of hours of customisations that are the issue. Every time we upgrade, things break. We are sick of rewriting them. The system is such a mess of hacks and plugins that it has become unmanageable. Which brings me to my next point. We dont NEED to do it all over again. We are taking this opportunity to look at our processes. We’ve been doing things the same way for such a long time that we’ve lost sight of what is actually necessary in a modern forum.
I hope that explains things a bit better.
Given a significant of amount of SitePoint resources know Ruby it does make sense to stop dilly-dallying and migrate software to Ruby. I will definitely give you that one as a value add. Now moving to a system running on Ruby makes much more sense from all perspectives.
After embarking on my post previously I did play around with Discourse somewhere. To that end I will take back some of what I said about the forum being bare bone. I think for most *basic business needs the software would suite a forum well out of the box. It does make sense to review business practices in a technology realm after an extended amount of time of doing the things the same way. It is nice that you guys are able to sell that to upper management because more companies than not keep doing things the same way until everything burns to the ground.
I would think that the largest advantage of doing this is the marketing SitePoint forums will again in getting in bed with Discourse as a partner. That seems to be a huge business perspective realm. Especially when you consider the target audience of these very forums.
I guess when you think about it it makes sense so long as it can all be sold upstairs.
Ok, I didn’t realise that Sitepoint has “priority support” from Jeff Atwood himself. I guess it really is like they say: “It’s not what you know it’s who you know.” The risk then is more of a marketing risk than a technical one. I’m not sure what I think but I can see now that Sitepoint is betting all it’s chips on Jeff Atwood’s cards.
I can attest to that, eh! 
I’m not sure it’s a good idea; I think the forum system works fine as it is. If it ain’t broken and all that…
That’s it exactly. Some works great, some is broken, and a whole lot works only because it has been tweaked and patched.
I’m not saying that something else would work 100% out-of-the-box, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of work needed.
Kind of like owning an old car, continue to sink money into it as it decays or take the risks of getting another.
You have a good idea of what’s wrong with what you have and you don’t know what will be wrong with the other. But there comes a time when the potential benefits outweigh the risk.
Personally I am not sure I follow why you believe Discourse will be a good choice for sitepoint with a community built up around technology.
I can see Discourse being a good match for forums which mainly contain basic conversations on various topics, but the majority of your forums are technology related with code examples etc.
The main flaw as I see it, is the lack of clarity of what is posted where, and the ease of getting to the content.
With the structure Discourse has, I fear your trying to “simplify” it to a point that actually finding valuable content can be difficult.
Personally I stopped visiting that often back when you migrated to last version of vBulletin and removed the majority of the sub forums (the ones being more specialized), right now what you see on the forums (programming) is mostly basic questions, trying to find an advanced topic is very difficult since you need to sift through everything else.
I wish you good luck, and will of course come by to check it out, but as mentioned I fear you are running into a similar issue as last time, sitepoint was one of the “go to” forums several years ago to discuss PHP, that is no longer the case.
Ok, I am hearing a couple of things in this discussion:
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We know ruby and rails so we want a RoR software base for our forum.
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Jeff Atwood is famous. We want to be famous too.
Ok, I get the first point. My personal forum is myBB. There are lots of bad things about it. I don’t even try to write plugins for it. I would go to a Python/Django forum if I could but there is nothing around I consider mature enough.
The second point I get but … and it’s a big “but”. You see that approach would be more likely to work 5 years ago. Google is focusing more and more on content and less and less on “Oh, he must be important because he is standing next to someone who is important”. Link building schemes are working less and less and I believe that trend will continue the way Google is going. So getting a link on Jeff Atwood’s site probably won’t be as beneficial as what you think.
I think the “marketing mistake” is to think the reason for low sales can be overcome by putting the product in a prettier box and having flashier advertising brochures. At the end of the day it comes down to providing what people are wanting, not what you think they should want!! That’s why I believe you should have asked the community for their input on what they wanted.
Yes, I understand you felt you needed to leave vBulletin. Just that we should have been more community focused on how we go about it.
I would say the problem is that Sitepoint is a cesspool of basic, beginner questions. The fundamental issue is professionals get sick of answering those questions and don’t ask questions themselves because it is not necessary. I can solve most problems myself much faster than waiting for someone to respond to a thread.
I disagree. I think there is a lot of business value in partnering with known name in the industry. Any partnership is much more than just a link on a website. It is referrals and indirect marketing to boot.
I’m not sure where you got the “we want to be famous too”, we don’t care about fame, we want a thriving community, one that participates better than what we have now. The community is consistently receiving less and less participation. We need to change that, otherwise, this forum will become non-existent and closed down for good.
The partnership with Jeff is more of a technological partnership. He has a team of bright individuals who have taken a different approach to how the core functionality of a forum works in a language that our developers know very well. This gives us two advantages that we don’t have now. 1) We can build on it without a lot of headaches, and 2) we can push ideas upstream and let them build them.
We’ve already had a few ideas pushed upstream that have made it to fruition and there are more in the pipeline. We are already seeing benefits and that was actually before we made the decision to partner with them!
Sure, we’ll get marketing benefits out of this partnership for a short while, but it won’t last forever. Eventually the buzz will die down and we’ll have to stand on our own two feet like we do today. I don’t see that being a really difficult challenge, as we gain new members daily. What I do see this change ultimately leading to is the ability to retain users better and to keep them engaged by showing that the more you engage, the more you can interact with the forums (you gain higher privileges; plus there will likely be more added too that would give some motivation to engaging in discussions).
It’s interesting that railsforum evaluated it and decided against it. You would have thought if anyone had reason to jump on that bandwagon they would.
https://railsforum.com/topic/4-welcome-to-the-new-rails-forum/
Oh, come on now! That was in August 2013. A lot has changed since then.
What referrals and direct marketing are you referring to? Are you saying you know something about the arrangement that Sitepoint has with Jeff Atwoods? I’m honestly scratching my head on this one.
I can’t see Jeff Atwood’s referring people here who are looking for answers to php questions seeing he despises the language so much.
Their reason for not back in Aug 2013
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It didn’t have the flexibility or maturity which we needed.
…
True, the Discourse Team seems to be inflexible as to adding many features to the Core, which will mean needing a lot of addons (Gems?)
But they have been responsive and quick to implement many of the tweaks and fixes we’ve brought to them, and as said, the SitePoint devs (and others) will be able to write code where need be.
And though somewhat more mature now a few months later, it is still in Beta with all that implies.
This has been one of the concerns many of us (Staff) have discussed extensively and the decision was given much thought.
To be fair, the beta status will be removed when they meet the 1.0 version (which isn’t far off).
It is an assumption from reading through the Discourse website. I tend to think when developers are quick to respond to people they are probably working with them to some capacity. That capacity probably being a partnership but I don’t know.