thoughts on forum

I like the new forum, but was any thought given to using discourse?  Check out what they did here: https://dtraleigh.com/ (click on community).  I just think it would be nice to offer a similar format to drive more users.  I think its free and easy to install as well... not sure how the web admin feels, or if they were aware of discourse, it seems a lot more popular that some of these older legacy forum layouts.  Most notably the better mobile support.

Thanks Sean. I'd be open to the idea of switching platforms. Do you have specific examples of why that platform is better? There are some behind-the-scenes reasons that I chose this platform. The biggest one is that the hosting of the forum is completely on "Nabble's" servers.

That said, if there is a substantial difference, I'd be open to it. I just accessed the site on mobile and it seems relatively painless to me. Are there specific issues with the Nabble forum that you have issue with?

One of my favorite things about the forums that https://community.dtraleigh.com use is that I can very easily see which topics I've already read all the replies to and for topics where there are new comments when I re-enter the topic it brings me to the most recent reply that I haven't seen. Whereas here, once I've opened a topic once the link is purple, and I'd have to manually review all the topics each time if I wanted to keep up with them all.

Dave @ Building Bull City wrote

Thanks Sean. I'd be open to the idea of switching platforms. Do you have specific examples of why that platform is better? There are some behind-the-scenes reasons that I chose this platform. The biggest one is that the hosting of the forum is completely on "Nabble's" servers.

Yeah not sure how your server is setup, I don't mind pitching in to help set it up.  I also noticed this forum doesn't have a valid SSL cert.  You just happened to have one of your fans (me) do web developer in a former life and handle automation for web servers.  Depending on the setup I could pitch in for the forum part, its pretty painless imho... but it is nice that Nabble's servers are doing this.... versus having to pay for hosting somewhere.  We could ask Leo what he does?  I can't imagine it takes a beefy hosting to get this working right.

Dave @ Building Bull City wrote

That said, if there is a substantial difference, I'd be open to it. I just accessed the site on mobile and it seems relatively painless to me. Are there specific issues with the Nabble forum that you have issue with?

its just a lot more modern... I want to get more people involved in the community because I am jealous of dtraleigh.com's community aspect.  It has features like liking a post similar to reddit, for those who want to contribute and let a comment author know they like the post, but don't have anything to type or rely.  The mobile for this forum is OK, I tried it.... you can tell the difference (buttons cut off, links, etc).  I think there is easy ways to import this entire forum later... but I dunno.  I don't really care that much, but I think its going to be hard to get adoption of a forum at all unless it has a lot of those features.  This forum layout reminds me of what I used when I was 14 versus the more modern layouts.  Its hard for me to say conretely what features they are... I do like the summaries where it shows last post, when it happened, etc, etc.  It also has gamieifcation where it encourages you to interact more.

Thanks for the input. That is all fair.

So, to be completely transparent, I went through Google Domains and signed up for a blogger account, which is free.

So google is essentially hosting my blog and Nabble is hosting this forum. I THINK (but am certainly no expert) that if I wanted to switch, it would mean having to pay for hosting in addition to domain registration, right? That very well may be worth it, but it is a consideration.

I completely agree with OP. Those forums are above and beyond these ones in terms of features and ease of use. Night and day. I understand not wanting the extra cost or hassle though; just giving my two cents.