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By icaria36 Sat Apr 25, 2020 8:00 pm
Kudos to the administrators and top contributors of this forum. The knowledge and support this community offers is impressive, and its archive too!

I wonder whether there have been any thoughts to renew / refresh the forum software, which in my very very humble opinion is getting in the way of the growth (and probably the diversity) of this community. Have you considered a migration to Discourse - https://www.discourse.org/?
By icaria36 Sun Apr 26, 2020 8:42 pm
In short, this forum intrinsically promotes two main types of users:

1. People who have a question and leave when they have an answer.
2. Regular users who invest a lot of time to follow topics and conversations.

Becoming a casual, slightly regular user is hard because it is hard to find or follow the topics that interest you in this torrent of activity, in this huge archive. The site won't call you back with the new stuff that might interest you. This ends up driving away many users, and this probably reduces the range of diversity in terms of musical background and experience, age, gender, English fluency...

Even starting as a new user isn't very easy. Limited formatting, and people with Internet expectations of 2020 find hard to share their links in all their glory (e.g. embedding media hosted in Soundcloud / YouTube / Instagram...).

The motivations to stay are based on your time available to go through the list of new posts. No "likes" to recognize others' posts, no "likes" recognizing your posts. Leave alone badges, trust levels, incremental features as you gain experience, full fledged user pages...

Discourse also offers very sophisticated moderation options which, to put it short, end up contributing to a more friendly and welcoming forum for everyone, and not only for those who think that it is OK to be harsh and blunt, bite newcomers, and so on.

I understand well how complex and even scary it is to even think about migrating an existing forum to another platform. I have gone through more than one migration myself, and I see that many communities have moved from phpBB to Discourse in the past years. While I'm new to MPCs, online communities have been part of my work for a long time. If you want to discuss or even experiment, I am very happy to help, and I can even set up a test instance in some server.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Discourse, neither I have an economic interest here. I am just passionate about online communities, I know and I love Discourse (just like I knew and I loved phpBB 20 years ago), and I really believe that these great MPC forums would get to another level with a piece of software up to the task.
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By richie Sun Apr 26, 2020 10:41 pm
It would however be cool if there were a Discord chatroom associated with this forum.

It could be fun to chat with some of you in real time.
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By MPC-Tutor Mon Apr 27, 2020 10:44 pm
Thank you for the suggestion, I have looked into it today but as I'm a php/mysql guy I would prefer to run something I can maintain comfortably myself. Beyond that, this forum isn't a huge priority ATM and just not up for a huge 1.5 million post migration to a completely different platform, but I do appreciate that discourse will no doubt provide a better experience in some ways, but of course some discourse features can be added to phpBB via mods, e.g. likes & reputation etc.
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By richie Tue Apr 28, 2020 1:54 am
MPC-Tutor wrote: Beyond that, this forum isn't a huge priority ATM and just not up for a huge 1.5 million post migration to a completely different platform


MPC-Tutor I'm a psychic expert and will suggest that if you skip breakfast and lunch, you can re-type all 1.5 million posts by 2135.
By hostnik Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:30 pm
richie wrote:It would however be cool if there were a Discord chatroom associated with this forum.

It could be fun to chat with some of you in real time.


Agreed. I created an account here in April and have more or less not engaged at all. Meanwhile I've joined a bunch of Discords in the last few weeks and check them like 8 times a day.

I used to think forums were better in terms of documenting answers in a persistent way, but Discord's search feature works really well, and it feels more like a community of friends, where forums usually feel more like random people who just occasionally interact.