- Edited
It is really hard to find threads. And once in a thread, hard to navigate the thread. Anyone else feel that way?
Has this topic ever come up before? Have there been proposals to the owner(s) to refine / change the forum software?
Does anyone else find this forum hard to use?
caboy I'm not a fan of the search functionality, so some of your concerns are shared with the management.
Dirty little secret about forum software. Given the rise of social media and other "centralized" platforms in the mid to late 2000s, interest in improving forum software among many communities somewhat plateaued. I vaguely remember around the time of creation of this forum (~2015) there was some discussion on which platform to use, and I recall the consensus was that while Flarum (software being used here) was (and isn't) perfect, in terms of getting a forum online now it beat out the prospect of either waiting or directly improving other potential options.
This all being said, with the questionable future of certain centralized social media platforms that shall go unnamed there has been more interest and development into self-hosted community platforms and I'm aware of other options on the table that are arguably on par or better than Flarum. This doesn't mean we're actively planning on moving things over, merely just a statement of the ecosystem.
If user concerns can be accurately articulated and solutions envisioned than perhaps some modifications to the existing forum could be considered.
It would help a little if the forum wouldn't depend on scrolling to load posts in big threads piece by piece. Which takes a lot of time and makes large threads unsearchable with Ctrl-F. But seeing how slow those small pieces load, loading everything at once may be even slower and may increase traffic a lot.