If you have ideas for improvements in how this forum works, there are two approaches that will most likely get the most traction:
Post an issue at meta.discourse.org (discourse is the software that this forum runs on and that site is where the people working on discourse discuss things like wishes/complaints/bugs)
Mention @sam and/or @discourse in your post. These are two discourse developers that have visited this forum and have provided answers. This may not be quite as good as option 1, but it will send a message to these guys so they know to read your post. Also feel free to mention @stevebaer so I get a message to take a look at your post.
I will always try and help where possible and some changes may be specific to the McNeel configuration of our discourse server, but I would like to remove and sort of “middle-man” approach where I am conveying what I think you are requesting to the discourse developers.
Discourse is being actively developed, so now is a good time to let these people know what you want. From what I can tell, the discourse team’s software development process is very similar to how McNeel writes software. They try to be open and release new versions often so people can try the latest features/fixes. They also make decisions based on what people are telling them in their user communities.
It would help if you gave us some insight, what factors of Forum Performance are actually in your hand and which could only be tweaked by the makers of Discourse.
If the issue is performance, we are going to try using a bigger server next week to see if that improves things for you. We can also investigate using Amazon’s cloudfront technology to see what improvements come from that. Other things we can play with are using different web server technologies (nginx versus apache).
I read in the Newsgroup that you’ll upgrade servers, but that’s not what I meant.
Rather: What can you do graphically - are there canned layout presets - could you make Discourse look or behave differently or must everything get written (even get written by third parties)? Could you expose controls to hide GUI elements (as @jim said put it so nicely:
a way to strip out the crap. And by crap I mean whatever the user
considers to be crap so that the user has the option switch to a more
crap-free view.
Yes, we can skin the user interface so things are hidden. I don’t want to immediately do something like that since it may hide good new features that show up in future builds of discourse. Restyling is something that I think we should wait on until later in the discourse development process.
And we need to be using it a few days to see if a feature may be something that proves to be useful or not.
I “liked” a few posts but don’t see the point yet. Not as good as a reply with “I agree…” but doesn’t bother me either. It’s a column in the list view and not much more, isn’t it?