Why was the switch made to this forum?
I find this UI is so cramped and busy it isn’t fun to work with, not to mention a lot of the other points made on the old forum.
Also who holds the data is it IX Systems, or is it farmed out to some SaaS provider?
This is all we know.
Self-hosted @ iX, same as the old forums. As for the UI, that is subjective of course.
This is the second forum change I’ve now been through.
I have never really liked this particular design type, I found it quite difficult to work with for years with the sites I discovered using it.
One small tip which took many many years of using it. If you’re searching with a CTRL F and really dislike the built in search, hit CTRL F a second time and you can use the real browser search. It’s very simple but my goodness it’s caused me frustration over the years.
To me the new forum is less intuitive, and a bit jumbled and less clear as to what is what. Maybe it just takes some getting used to. But at this point I can’t even figure out how to quote posts (let alone multiple posts) in replies 
Good tip!
Quoting is a bit different, you can highlight any text from the topic above your reply box and a “quote” option will pop up. I’ve found this to be super-helpful for newcomers to Discourse:
Xenforo has problems scaling? I run a forum with over 30 mln posts and a few mln pageviews per month on a simple dedicated server.
Hell, IGN runs a Xenforo forum with over 140 mln posts…
I also can’t image most of the visitors here like the UX of this forum more compared to the old Xenforo forum. I think it’s truly terrible.
But time will tell. The stats (number of views/threads/replies) will tell us if I am correct or not.
Nah, it wasn’t a scaling issue as far as performance or size goes. It was something we’ve been kicking around as a project for a few years now, Xenforo was showing its age.
That said, we set a new record for user posts over the past 12 months just yesterday, and Saturday was the third highest for the past 12 months as well. So by that metric, so far so good.
That’s pretty much the same as XenForo, minus the quote-the-whole-thing button XenForo has. Not a big deal from my perspective, and outweighed by fewer bugs than on XenForo (mobile could be pretty hard to use for more advanced editing, and by that I mean “anything that’s not plain text”).
Aside from the narrow view, in particular as far as code blocks are concerned, the basic forum functionality is pretty decent.
Partly agree on the aging part. They are just currently releasing betas for the new 2.3 version, that took way longer as expected.
It’s probably just a personal issue. I just really dislike the UX here (and all similar forums).
Guess I have to get used to it…
The issue was with the people managing it, apparently.
I suspect some of that is because there are even more new posts that are really “FAQ”, since people come here and don’t bother to search the old forum.
Plus, if you count migrating resources as new posts, that’ll skew your metrics.
New and Shiny.
I ran several forums back in ye olden days, and was moderator in a few others. I always loved vBulliten and Xenforo was literally developed by the same guys…so I’ve always been comfortable there.
The market has (un)fortunately shifted to modern UIs and data structures and the forum space is now dominated by Discourse, especially in the tech scene. It’s different but it also celebrates a lot of the successes that Reddit brought. Plus markdown is great.
I’m glad IX moved. It was time.
Wow. This new Forum design is a complete nightmare to work with. So impoverished. So confusing. Someone said that how rubbish it is is “subjective”. Well, not entirely. There are well established HCI and User-oriented design principals that have been established for decades now, absolutely none of which have troubled the construction of this mess.
It took me nearly 10 minutes to find a small grey button off to one side that let me post this general response - before that I almost found myself posting this as if it were a reply to some other poster.
I am about to post my first thread to this forum. It feels like casting a rock into a lake while wearing a blindfold. I doubt I’ll be able to find it again, much less others.
Awful.
You mean the blue button at the bottom of every topic, right in the middle of the page? The one that looks like this:
@kris: I looked up the Discourse feature set. I assume you guys are subscribing to the Business plan. Why was the decision made to not migrate the original Xenforo content?
Self hosted open-source version.
We did some test migrations of all users and content. We found it polluted the forums with so much organizational mess. One driver for moving was to clean that up the sprawl we had on Xenforo. It would have been months of effort to put things into the proper organizational structure, and even then most of the content being moved was stale or completely wrong now for old versions of FreeNAS. So in the end it made more sense to have a fresh start, selectively port over the Resources that made the most sense and are still relevant in 2024. The old forums aren’t going away, we’ll keep those up for reference since there is value in being able to go look at the history. We realize that did originally cause some heartburn for some folks, but hopefully things have settled down now.
No. I don’t mean that one. I mean the one exactly as I described.
That you too are confused about this interface rather proves my point. 
The blue button at the bottom is what I would think of as the normal reply to topic button (more or less where it was on the old forum). That one over there is part of the sticky sidebar and appears to be intended as an extra reply button that is always on screen, no matter where you are in the thread.
