[Poll] Do you prefer the old BLF or the new BLF?

[sb56637]

Hi there @YBF650 , thanks for your reasonable and balanced opinion.

@YBF650

The infinite scroll is convenient but makes it harder to navigate very long threads due to a lack of precision.

I would actually argue that the new method is more precise, and becomes more useful the longer the thread gets. I describe this in detail and compare it with the old method here:

Different Forum Recommendation

I’m like you in that sense, I tend to have old school preferences in technology and yet I’m primarily a mouse user for most things. Sorry if I’ve missed something, what is the glitch related to jumping to the first or last post by clicking the first or last date/time in the time slider? In general terms I totally understand complaints about pointless change in technology, especially deletion of useful features or “dumbification” of the UI just to make it look clean or trendy. But in this spe…

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@Speadge

flat view threads get burried and forgotten with the new ones within the same day.
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without static subforums

Hi there @Speadge , could you go into a bit more detail about these two points? I think we might not be understanding each other here. As ToyKeeper mentioned, there has been no functional change in those two aspects compared to the old forum software.

Possibly the biggest contributing factor to the rapid initial growth of BLF from the very beginning was the “Recent Posts” list of new threads and/or threads with current activity front and center on the homepage, which was strangely overlooked in most other forum engines. Now this current Discourse software was created by developers that also recognize the critical importance of showing what’s new/current on the homepage.

However, the Latest list is only one of the angles of viewing the forum, and shouldn’t be confused with its organizational structure. I totally agree with you that a Reddit-style flat-chronological forum structure is terrible for threads getting buried, and in that sense the current Discourse engine is even better than before. The only way to access the forum categories in the old forum was with a single obscure “Forum” link in the left sidebar. Every month I received multiple PMs asking “How do I post a new thread?” because they couldn’t find the forum categories and therefore couldn’t find the “New topic” button. Now the categories are much more prominent, including in the Latest topics list, which is something that I always wanted to display in the old Recent Posts list but couldn’t due to technical limitations.

It’s also worth noting that the search function we have now is head and shoulders above what we had before, which also contributes to finding and continuing valuable historical conversations. There’s also a very good mechanism on the homepage to help keep track of posts that are new for you and help you pick up where you left off on your last visit, as described here:

New BLF forum engine FAQs

Hi everyone, I finally found some time to summarize the answers to the most common questions about the new BLF forum engine. Why? The forum engine that powered the original BLF was not actually a forum engine, it was a bare-bones framework for creating generic websites, and to make it work like a forum it required tons of third-party modules and custom coding by me. The version of the site engine that BLF used was running on borrowed time, as the creators of that software have moved to a new…