Seems you've missed the intent/point in a few places, but I only want to address this one:
I, of course, don't care about the technology that makes the platform run. So what if discourse loads posts by parts as I scroll along; I couldn't care less. However, it does it automatically, so the only thing I need if I want to read is to keep scrolling. On reddit, however, I have to keep clicking on things; the thread structure is annoying enough, but the incessant ads and popups are just the worst.
(And yes, I do have an account on both. I just think reddit went down the drain lately.)
Reddit's new design is awful, clunky and not comparable to Discourse. I don't know about you but Discourse is so smooth for me. Luckily old.reddit.com and mobile apps works great. But as somebody pointed out above, Reddit posts gets archived after some time. Which could be a problem for some threads like Share your css that almost became like wiki pages and are growing over time.
I love Reddit's voting system and nested comments, but I think this forum is clean enough that voting system is not necessary.
I don't understand what you are saying here. Endorsing Reddit hardly makes one a non-conformist. You simply have a different opinion. But here on Discourse, your opinion will be treated equally with others. It won't be downvoted into invisibility.
I disagree. Technology has a serious impact on how communication happens.
Voting can just as easily amplify noise. Reddit is popular because it's a free-for-all.
A fun observation of several things at once:
Consider tagline creation currently going on in the lounge. It started as "submit your idea" thing, turned into a poll where your idea would be voted on. In the end, the requirements for the tagline had changed yet the poll choices stayed the same.
As a life experiment it shows in my opinion that some ways of engagement with audience clearly benefit from a certain tech. The same poll would be better if it would be in reddit because you can collect, in real time, best gems submitted by the community. Currently requirements changed, poll has an irrelevant result and as a author you need to nullify the poll results and ask people again for submissions. Puts both voter and poll author in a weird position.
Yet on reddit your very post, @thejohnfreeman would be downvoted heavily due to less than humble tone and I'm as a user wouldn't be able to see it. That would be unfair. So, in order to judge each post we would need more complex system that would allow to evaluate content and a form of the input separately (not just upvote/downvote). I believe in that case the community would be better off regardless of its size, wouldn't it?
However I'm not aware of such developed platform.
At the moment I have no opinion in the question what's the platform should be. I think the plugin system has shown wild success and I could piggyback on its premise:
I believe If people like their platform of choice, they can create their own unofficial community and see what flies and what doesn't. Those who'd like the forum to be on the paid platform could create a cash bounty for sponsoring the switch or offer server resources/admin services for maintenance.
Let me know what you think, be critical if you must, I don't mind
This community is tiny. Judging based on views and replies in Discourse, this community would be lucky to break 10,000 subs with its own subreddit at this moment. This thread has 44 comments, and most are replies, not top-level. Unless this community is filled with people who would downvote me only because they disagree, then my comments would show up just fine and you wouldn't have to scroll any further than you do on Discourse.
Reddit is a no-go for me. So, if we moved to reddit, I would definitely not be contributing to any discussions anymore. I mentioned that before. I'm not saying that I should be the reason for not moving, but I am pretty sure that others dislike Reddit as much as I do.
Yep, hate Reddit though I won't go as far as to say I'd leave this community of it came to that. Discord on the other hand, I'm probably giving away my age here but I just don't get that at all.
Just give me good old forum software, if need be even a free ad supported platform such as Proboards would be preferred over those.
I just can't imagine a cheap dedicated server can't handle a forum like this... Have a look at Hetzner or even OneProvider for some great offers and unlimited bandwidth.
This doesn't solve the problem forever (or maybe even for now), but it looks like Discourse is 50% off hosting for Open Source projects, so the Business Class would seem to be $150 vs $300.
It also seems like they might help with moving to a VPS
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I am for sticking with Discourse if possible since there is a lot of history here. One thing I would like to figure out is an easier way to make "wiki" pages that answer common / evergreen questions. I know that discourse calls one page type a wiki, but it looks like a normal post and doesnt have any sort of hierarchy so I never bother. Maybe if we moved more of this content to structured pages, the page views to the forum itself would decrease?
I said I won't be posting anymore. I will not abandon Joplin nor the community. You just won't read any comments on reddit from me. That's all.
e.g. I'm also not too happy with stackoverflow anymore. Often a solution is picked that is actually wrong. If you are blunt like me, you are always downvoted, even though you speak the truth (without name calling or personally offending someone). They rather care about sugar coating, diplomacy, and sucking up to others, than facts. Unless you are moderator. In which case you can even be openly unfriendly to people. I can't deal with this bigotry.
Actually, you don't even have to be blunt, you only have to point out that an answer is factually wrong with providing proof... and it can end up with you being banned.
Do mean some kind of hierarchical menu? Because it can be done using a special tag, as was done for example for the GSoC blog last year.
If there's enough interest in it I guess we could have a main community wiki post that would link to other wiki pages. And we could pin this main wiki post so that's it's always easily accessible. I think that would make sense because there's indeed quite a bit of content on the forum that's not part of the official doc, but that can be very useful anyway.
I've also created a few tags like #how-to and #tips-and-tricks to make certain posts easier to find.
P.S. We can create more tags. I removed the possibility to create tags for users with lower trust levels, because a lot of people added weird, undescriptive, useless tags which only messed up the tag system.
Perhaps some ever-green information could also be transferred into a community run documentation/FAQ (done in Discourse but Git Book or something would be even better).
That would be a great starting point for new users, but also quite some work to maintain it.
(Sorry for the Off topic)
I think we should stick with discourse. There is too much history here to switch to something else. Amanda also showed that it doesn’t seem to be to difficult/expensive.
I will start using tags as @tessus mentioned, I think that will be a good way to pay attention to what content is evergreen / FAQ.
As for the idea of a wiki, I realized that I am should probably just look to move things to help instead of creating a new place. I know that it is built from Github somehow. but not sure what the tech is. Would be cool if that was editable on the page itself / easier to see how to add new pages, but that might not be worth investing any time into.
That was my thought. I'm wondering if you thought it needed to be a wiki so anyone could edit, or whether you were just meaning help articles. I would think that allowing a few volunteers to edit help articles, possibly with a comment section so people could suggest additions. The scope is rather limited and allowing anyone to edit might not be worth the trouble. On the other hand, it would be good if new folks could easily be given permission to edit help articles. Sometimes new people are well positioned to write up documentation since they are seeing things with fresh eyes.
Maybe Joplin is still too dynamic, but I think having well written documentation is far superior to expecting new people to search the forum and post questions to get problems solved. Of course the forum is essential. But it's not the best first stop for new folks.
In general I think official documentation should go under /help, but there are also more general topics that are more suitable for a community wiki. For example, how to setup WebDAV with a particular provider, how to import notes from CherryTree, how to customise the app CSS, etc. I wouldn't necessarily want to have this in the doc because it's a bit too specialised, however that would be good topics for a community wiki, which could be updated by anyone over time.
I agree that the pull request system is not well suited for this but creating wiki posts on Discourse maybe indeed combined with tags might work.
I hadn't paid attention to this before, but I don't actually see a way to create a wiki post. Perhaps my trust level isn't high enough?
On another forum I use (that uses discourse) there is a wiki category. I'd say that a specific category for documentation wikis makes much more sense than tags, although tags could be used to organize the category. I actually think that the GSOC would be better as tags rather than categories, but that's a different issue.