Please Migrate to a modern forum platform

[fuzzysb]

Please Consider archiving the Forums on vBulletin and investing in Discourse. this would increase engagement hugely in the community, i for one hate vbulletin, its stuck in a timewarp from a decade ago. discourse IMHO is the gold standard in community engagement.

[simplextech]

Please Consider archiving the Forums on vBulletin and investing in Discourse. this would increase engagement hugely in the community, i for one hate vbulletin, its stuck in a timewarp from a decade ago. discourse IMHO is the gold standard in community engagement.

+1

I fully agree with this proposal.

[happnatious1]

I for one hate change. But out of curiosity is there an example site you can point to?

[sirmeili]

I for one hate change. But out of curiosity is there an example site you can point to?

I want to see a sample too. I didn't care for the HomeSeer forums when I joined back in 2015, but now that I'm used to them it doesn't bother me and is no better/worse than any other forums I frequent.

[randy]

I for one hate change. But out of curiosity is there an example site you can point to?

I don’t mind change, but also still feel vBulletin is good forum software. We are sill on 3.X here and there has been a bunch of development with vBulletin currently on 5.X.

Discourse is here. Click on Community at the top for an instance of the software.

[AutomatedJim]

here. Click on Community at the top for an instance of the software.

Looking at both, I like the latest version of vBulletin better than Discourse.

Just my ▼▼▼

[ewkearns]

This is an interesting thread.

I'd never heard of "Discourse," so I looked it up and found a few example websites. [Google is your friend.] It certainly looks polished and does not induce the 300 baud acoustical scream that I still hear in my head with vBulletin and like BBSs.... (in addition to my wife picking up the phone and me losing the carrier..... sorry hon, are you on the computer? Grrrrr.....)

OTOH, it appears to come with a price..... which IMHO is pretty astronomical.... and I'm pretty sure HS would come to the same conclusion....

OTOOH, I found some 5.x vBulletin websites that were improvements on the existing HS software.

So, I'm just going to throw this out there for rumination.....

1) What is the purpose of this forum ___________?

2) What does this forum do for HS ________?

3) What would induce them to spend the extra cash.... clearly an increase in COB that is justified by _______?

4) Does this forum reach the core HS user _______?

5) Would the benefits outweigh the costs ___________?

[randy]

Looking at both, I like the latest version of vBulletin better than Discourse.

Just my ▼▼▼

[cheeryfool]

I am not that fussed either way with what we have currently. The newer version looks a little slicker, but I am also doubt they'd change to an entirely different solution unless all commercials made sense. That seems unlikely.

[Pete]

Current version of vBulletin on Homeseer looks fine to me.

Thinking HST did try an update to vBulletin a couple of years back. The update did not work out well and it was downgraded to current version.

[simplextech]

I for one hate change. But out of curiosity is there an example site you can point to?

A lot of sites are using discourse now

community.smartthings.com
community.home-assistant.io
community.hubitat.com

Those are discourse. I saw other posts about cost (I didn't know there's a cost for discourse). But as for features benefits. Adding screenshots, urls, etc is copy/paste and not clicking, grabbing url etc. Quoting is by far the best of highlight and hit quote and that's it. Inline code features and syntax highlighting of different languages.

Now, I have not seen any examples of newer version of vbulletin, so nothing to compare with. Just bouncing from homeseer, vera, home-assistant, hubitat, smartthings forums and discourse is faster, gives notifications in browser of new posts and replies, I find a lot of times with this forum I don't always get "new posts" and it's sometimes hard to track and follow multiple threads. Or maybe I'm not used to this forum software as much as I am the others and such....

As someone else posted, yes lets go back to vbbs, WWIV, Obv/2, SearchLight.

[spike5884]

Me old school. All I need is a plain & simple forum.
Jump on. Read what is new. Done.

I don't need all the social fluff that comes with the new stuff!

[simplextech]

Oh one more thing.

#1 reason for a newer forum? WORKING SEARCH

Current search does not work well and I can't find anything.

[sirmeili]

Oh one more thing.

#1 reason for a newer forum? WORKING SEARCH

Current search does not work well and I can't find anything.

Go to Google and search

[search terms] site:forums.homeseer.com

By far the best way to search any forums that I've found (some actually include searches that just redirect to Google with the Site: option added for their domain)

[GaryFunk]

If a change were to be made, I'd suggest Vanilla Forums.