I checked it out. Here’s my unbiased review.
1) super buggy at the moment, at least for me on I-phone 11 anyway. Example: when scrolling thru a thread w/ a lot of Gifs (and ads), the thread jumps around and eventually just goes full white-screen. You then have to click refresh or go out & back into the thread to continue viewing w/out obstruction.
2) not a fan of not having pages. Makes scrolling thru a long thread cumbersome, even using the scroll bar. Software does take you to last unread post, but that’s buggy at the moment as well on threads w/ a lot of media embedded. No pages also just makes things confusing to me, in terms of being able to locate a post you would typically be able to find quite easily if you were able to reference a page #.
3) layout is pretty brutal. I’m sure discourse will provide the top men plenty of options for themes to choose from, should they decide to expand on the looks. I’m more of a fan of the style/layout of our site & sherdog. Theirs seems pretty off-the-shelf with a lot of wasted space as well.
Applaud them for trying to offer their users a better experience. There’s potential for a lot of improvements from their previous site thru the Discourse software...instant notifications, post ratings, quoting, media embed, etc. All the stuff we have here. I personally would have chosen Xenforo. Splinty is a genius when it comes to web development and that’s what he chose, so I have to think it’s a better platform. But maybe Discourse will turn out to be the bees knees when it’s all said and done.
But as of right now, after months of input & collaboration from the members regarding what they wanted the site to be, and behind the scenes development by the owners, I’d be somewhat disappointed that this is what was rolled out.
On a 1-10 scale. If the Discourse experience could be a 10 when fully maximized, I’d rate this about a 3 right now. Seems like there’s still a lot of work to be done & maybe they’ll get there.
Did see they’re still offering blue names. Not exactly sure what benefits that will provide members now that the features that gave them on the old site are now available to everyone on this one.
Anyway, that’s this dumbasses 2 cents.