I've unfortunately seen this thread rather late. The idea of opening up the community more and working towards a living coop is great!
The new forum software as I mentioned before has me worried. At bare minimum there needs to be a working archive of this forum so people can access all the wonderful threads here without fighting with the wayback machine and not knowing if what they're looking for even exists anymore.
The other folks here mentioning account migrations and data migrations are good suggestions too.
I understand it's easier to use modern software and such because sometimes documentation being more up to date is helpful. But a lot of discourse forums I see out there and new forums in general have really lifeless CSS design. This forum is successful in part because it is well designed and our eyes can find what we're looking for in the interface easily. But! More importantly! This forum's design is fun!
Some things I would miss if we moved to discourse that give this place a lot of personality.
That this forum isn't an endless scrolling website. Discourse forums tend to load their content by endlessly scrolling the forum in a given catagory. There are no page numbers, page numbers are a good thing that making browsing the forum and finding old threads more user friendly.
The status update bar on the right side of the website. Having that little microblogging functionality built in helps me keep up with what everyone is doing.
The big avatars shown to the left of people's posts in threads. Discourse forums tend to have really small avatars and it often looks like I'm reading a wall of text and don't get to see the person's personality.
The categories on the forums that also have big images next to them instead of the super small ones that discourse threads often have.
The background of the desert underneath the easy on the eyes transparent background in the body of STP's current CSS.
The green on black style in general, nature and punk is cool, and it's not a color scheme I see around much, especially not with such beautiful transparency.
The fully functional text editor that comes with the current forum software. Being able to do lists, paragraph alignment, fonts, images, smilies, etc easily is really nice. I don't know for discourse specifically but modern PHPbb forums have a much less functional editor if you don't have basic coding skills than editors on forums in the past. I wouldn't want to lose this functionality if discourse's editor is less user friendly.
How fleshed out people's profiles are on this website and how people can have their own library and profile posts in addition to their profile. Discourse forums tend to be a downgrade in this respect and limit people to a simple activity feed and a basic about section.
There's a big theme with my gripes over discourse and new forum designs in general. Less is not more in this case, this forum is already minimalist and functional. Removing functionality like a lot of modern forum software does can only be a downgrade overall. All these software suites look more and more like reddit every year. I come to places like this to get away from reddit.
To see an example of what I mean look at this forum.
Bienvenue dans la plus grande communauté du monocycle francophone. Discussions, questions, conseils, petites annonces… Rejoignez-nous ! 👍
forum.monocycle.info
It's in french I know, but ignore that for a moment. Notice how small everything is and how hard it is for the eyes to focus on anything and how the threads all lack personality. This is a badly designed forum using discourse.
To give another more optimistic example, look at this website.
Discuss anything related to nature photography here.
community.naturephotographers.network
This forum has larger images for threads and larger avatars initially and the sidebar is clearly differentiated from the body of the UI. But it's still missing a lot of the functionality I mentioned that this forum has like status updates and highly customizable profiles. And then it becomes frustrating again once you get into a thread because the avatars get tiny again and it's easy to get lost.
So with all that said, please please please at least archive this forum for us. Thankyou for reading I hope my post did not come to late and wish the community luck with the coming changes. I doubt this iteration of the forum will keep being used but I hope that the CSS in the new forum at least will be customized to be as functional as possible and all of this forums data will be archived/transitioned. Don't let the punk website get killed by corporate minimalism!
Edit: I forgot about signatures! The signatures below peoples posts that show up everywhere they post are another good feature that is lost in discourse forums!
