The old forum was built with SMF. Because of this we had very few possibilities to upgrade and improve the forum's feature set and layout.
We looked at several options and found that
Discourse is a communication/discussion platform with a great features set. It's also under continuous development and supported by a great community, so we chose to move to discourse.
All posts and accounts have been migrated. You need to reset your password because the encryption used at SMF differs from discourse.
Just on that , it's really easy to keep track of new and unread posts now. The big thing with Discourse is that in time as our user base keeps growing we can share the load across multiple instances and can handle a lot more traffic then SMF.
With that being said anything new takes time getting used too and
we would like to hear peoples feedback on the changes.
Also special thanks to Cookie who started the previous forums for us and maintained it, if I am not mistaken the old forums will still be kept around for a bit as a backup.
Wouldn't it have been more elegant if this question was raised before the decisions were made? I think I can get used to the new layout, but have to honestly say I liked the old forum better, it fits the look and feel of NLG better.
On another note, I hope this isn't distracting the DEV team to much from the ALGO work, for that, at least to me, is the most important thing right now!
