Reply To: Now that you're all here reading the forums again…..

[timchubb 3166xp 2]

@sundancer as a blog with a handful of users it’s good, different beast when you try and add granular permissions, subscription levels etc that and the WordPress obsession with backwards compatibility with ancient plugins and some questionable db design decisions (i.e. Every forum stat is stored as a string for example so rather than + 1 to post count it converts to a number then adds 1 then converts back, no big deal in that example until you want to sort by post count then its about as inefficient as possible) means it does not scale linearly (the bigger the meta data set the slower to query the site has about 50 million rows of meta data for example and growing) , your pretty screwed if the performance issue lies within the core classes.

@blinky465 collaboration projects could be fun will have a think on that should be doable as they inherit a lot from the live blog system here, your not wrong when you say project log it’s exactly that, pretty much a live blog with some predefined content chunks to make it easy for people to publish.  @phaidknott Which is one reason why I would look to having side channel discussion in a thread separate to the log, that way people can muck in and talk about the project without it detracting from the project authors personal log.  Comments would ruin the flow of the project listing which is why they are only shown on the entry detail page rather than the listing, possibly could make them load on demand but even then would be messy.  If you look at a game listing page we use tabs to separate the different content, so the way I would propose to access the thread would be through a discussion tab on the project listing allowing you to post to the thread from the project section or from the forums, I just think a thread would work better for questions and comments, while comments unless they are specifically about the entry are less good for talking about the project, all of this would be in addition not instead of.

As for forum activity tailing off that definitely happened following the release of 2.0 of the site, the introduction of projects cannibalised a lot of thread creation, combined with activity trailing off anyway with v1 of the site I think some of the old threads and personalities did a good job of scaring some people away (brexit discussions, cliquey behaviour, needless trolling, some, people who couldn’t help but be triggered by people liking games they didn’t) all had an impact, discord has just exacerbated the situation to some extent, can’t argue its less hassle to post a pic quickly to discord than here for example, at the same time discord is its own island and can’t easily be dragged into the site (nor should it probably its a bit more suitable for all ages on the site, discord would require censoring for example if it had a feed on home page) just to avoid the site triggering content filters or getting a mature content rating on Google etc.  As I’ve said a few times if you think of discord like a pub your about right, you expect a pub to be rowdy on a Friday night anything goes up to a point, your chatting about the show/hobby but your not necessarily doing your project for display on discord until it scrolls away.