This forum has an amazing community and a wealth of information in it, but it's pretty hard to find the good stuff and separate it from the noise.
- For example, there's no way to "Like" a post.
- No way to bookmark posts
- Long threads can't be summarized
- The OP can't edit their initial post, so you have to wade through a 20-page thread to get to the stuff you're looking for
- The search function sucks enough that I prefer to use Google Site Search, which is awkward
- The mobile experience looks like this:
- You can't upload images and we force users to go through 3rd party sites
That's no wonder - this forum runs on an engine called SimpleMachines, which was built in 2001 (!). Almost 20 years ago. And it hasn't evolved much.
The good news is there's a much better forum engine out there called Discourse
https://www.discourse.org/
It's open source and built by the people behind the Internet's #1 Q&A site for programmers (StackOverflow) and it has all the features we need - basically it solves every single bullet item I listed above.
- ♥ posts
- Bookmark posts
- Summarize long automatically!
- The OP can edit their initial post, so all the juicy info can be in one place. They can anser FAQs there etc.
- Search works really well
- The mobile experience is amazing
- You can simply upload them from your computer or even paste them from the clipboard
- Great antispam and moderation tools
Another piece of good news is that I've been maintaining a large forum (a bit similar to this actually) since 2011 and I migrated it to Discourse a couple years back, so I can do this migration for us. There's a migration script already and a helpful community around it.
Mods, please PM me. I know you've been absent, but let's get us a nice-looking modern forum - it will help shed the stigma around CLL and it will make everyone's life easier.
With Discourse, that's as simple as selecting the text you want to quote and hitting "Reply". The text is quoted automatically.