Ok, I’ve inserted a reply to another thread here as I feel it is more “on topic” for this thread.
Firstly I believe any success Sitepoint is having is due to its community, not it’s software base. Of course really bad software may be an impediment to community building but that never occurred to me about vBulletin. Sure I understand its not perfect but I don’t think you are magically going to build a better community just because you’re got a prettier, more shiny forum. Also people are not robots and neither are moderators which is something Jeff Atwoods doesn’t appear to understand.
To use the ship metaphor above, if you believe your ship has sprung a leak the first thing to do is keep your head and not just run for the lifeboats. Making calm, rational decisions is always more important. Can we fix the leak should be the first question we should ask ourselves, not run for the lifeboats.
Sadly, one thing Sitepoint seems to have done, is undervalued its community. We have some very good SEO sections on here. Since I’m not an SEO expert I find these posts quite helpful. Admittedly some of its nonsense but some of it is good also. What I’m saying is maybe we should be using our most important resourse here, those that come and bring their wisdom to this forum, and we should have at least consulted them to address the issues that we have here.
After canvassing the internet with Google search I found a number of posts which talk about the friction incurred from prematurely changing forum software. You are always going to lose some members by doing it. It ought not to be a decision made lightly.
Also I see people signing up on these forums, often daily. Surely that counts for something.
It’s not just a Tapatalk thing. Sure I find tapatalk incredibly useful but even if I’m the only one who uses it I still feel the decision to move to Discourse was made prematurely without asking the community what they thought. Ok, they were sort of asked, if you count my Jeff Atwood thread, but not until it was pretty much a “fait accompli”. The politicians in my country are experts in that kind of “consultation”. I would have thought a public poll would have been the bare minimum in this process.
I used to know someone who had a flair for building vibrant chat room communities. She really knew how to draw people in. However she could never settle on which plsatform she wished to use. One week it was IRC, next she got dissatisfied and moved the room to Paltalk. After a while she didn’t like that and moved it to Teamspeak. It just went on and on and everytime she moved she lost members and at the end of it all I remember her bemoaning sitting in a room by herself.
Do we really have to make the same mistakes here?