I kind of like the new UI. It’s refreshing comparing to old one. Frankly, I don’t feel like it’s something to be difficult to use.
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I know it could be the fact that nobody likes changes, but the XenForo + theme was what used to define TE for me. I used to scroll through so many discussions there and learn a lot. Now it feels like just every other Discourse. There’s no personality anymore (it’s not TE’s fault). It’s just how Discourse is. Just text and no soul and SO MUCH WASTED space.
PS: Do not open your browser history after scrolling this thread from top to bottom 
To change theme to Default or any other, one need to click on …
Profile >> Summary >> Preference >> Interface
Under Default theme, Replies and Activity counts are clickbale so you can avoid particular Thread page scrolling (all pages of same thread) from Starting to End and can reach directly at end of page (last/latest post/replies), even from Topic page.
HTH someone like me
Same here. Ever since the UI changed I tried getting back in but I haven’t been able to. It’s modern and great looking but from a functionality point of view its a downgrade in my opinion.
What Others Forget to notice is admin had very few options if we want to migrate, as not only he have to migrate while keeping in mind future compatibility but also preserving the old threads and chats/dms which is very hard thing to accomplish
just imagine migrating while loosing old threads and posts later
also people saying what was the need to migrate Xenfono was old and outdated its matter of time a CVE was discovered and i highly doubt the devs would have patched it in time for community version
There are multiple options though like Flarum, myBB, Vanilla that are regularly updated and more traditional. All would have migration tools in place.
However, I wouldn’t envy the admin’s role in determining what would work well.
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Whitespace is free, you don’t have to worry about having too much of it. I have font-size set to smallest and there’s clear separation between posts, post controls and other click targets. That was not the case before, I’d skip posts when skimming through a thread, looking for something (because the search was so bad).
For those who were used to full-width design, you were just used to bad design. You shouldn’t need to turn your head to read text from edge to edge of your monitor. It’s been a usability standard for decades to have readable text as a central block of content. Why do you think newspaper columns are so narrow? Same with textbooks. Imagine if they spanned the entire width of the sheet, it’d be a terrible experience. Narrower body of text means our eyes/brain focusses on reading and comprehending instead of breaking concentration to find the beginning of the next line.
For pagination, the bar on the right is the same, but vertical. Except for pages, you’re at posts. It’s a more accurate way of gauging how far deep you are in a thread. And you’re able to drag or click to any post. You don’t need to go to a page and wait for it to load to find something you remember being mentioned previously.
I like discourse, it’s fast, it’s sleek, you’re able to hop around every corner of the forum effortlessly whereas previously, there were entire sections I’d never visited in the last 5+ years.
What I’m a little concerned about is if all this dynamic content would affect the forum’s ability to monetize through ads, xenforo was basically dynamically served static urls, so ads were context aware.
Also, most of the dislike sounds like grumpy old men reminiscing about a time when they had to walk uphill both ways, in the rain, without shoes, carrying hundreds of books for school while working full-time in the rice fields. Allow yourself to discover what’s new and exciting with the forum. Start with trying to hover/click over anything and everything that isn’t post content.
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Well specifically speaking we all had our chance of providing feedback to him for more than two months when a temporary forum was up and running for testing in beta without posts
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Completely missed it then because came to know of the new setup only after the migration.
I was hoping the @testingguy would have caught it during the testing phase. Did he?
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It is easy to be dismissive about any criticism on a change as an old man fallacy. Discourse is technically better, in keeping with technology trends and probably is the most attractive solution for administrators.
However, whether it is best for users depends on the type of community and content. For one, TE content doesn’t move fast enough to basically require a chat interface and infinite scrolling.
It is preferable to have easy access to organized content, for which a traditional forum design works well.
Anyway, some of the criticisms mentioned previously that apply to Discourse are actually bad design principles. Pretty sure a lot of them can be addressed with plugins which will take time, but that doesn’t make the criticisms invalid.
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Am pro Discourse so i might be biased
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If massively popular international forums like Linus Tech Tips or Resetera can thrive on Xenforo or Invision Community, rather than Discourse, then TE would definitely had.
Why change something that has proved and still continue to prove to be a success, for a such a long time?
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Well atleast we follow Ticket Driven Development (TDD). 
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When you change this setting:
You get this:
This could be your home page by changing that one setting.
Is that not what you’re talking about here?
You have the same organization structure as the old forum, complete with sub-sections. It’s just the sections are now called categories. Discourse hasn’t taken away anything about TE’s structure, it’s just offered an alternative way to browse the same content (which you are free to ignore).
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Just my thought.. no point in having technically superior code underneath , only to fail miserably in achieving the end result.
Discourse can be fast , better coded , open source etc.. but imho , its just doesnt cut for me. My consumption of TE has drastically reduced, since my ability to discover threads of my wish has gone down significantly due to confusing thread listing and what not.
Also even within thread , i simply dont know where i am , either at the end or from last position i left .. on xeno or other forums , when i click a link , i know where i am going .. or can configure whether to go to first page or last page.
infinite scrolling is pure BS.
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Discourse is not likeable. It usually takes time to adjust to a new interface and the forum and the mods need to keep it modern on the both front and backends. But for me the Discourse has made it pretty difficult to navigate. I cannot exactly pin point what it is but the whole UI feels uncomfortable.
Forums are supposed to be blinkered with contexts. Pages which can be changed. Borders which can clearly demarcate what is what. These are not social media which need prolonged engagement through infinite scroll, that suits exploitative and manipulative profiteering social media.
Forums are also supposed to be more descriptive and organised to maximise information density. For whatever reasons current Discourse feels worse on those fronts. I don’t even know now what the post is except for what the title shows until I open and read it. Then I know that these categories are somewhere but I haven’t found them intuitively.
All these are driving engagement down for me at least.
If I said something which has already been said then apologies. I cannot “scroll” through 70 replies for this. Now I read last 2 replies maybe, earlier I would navigate last 2 pages to understand the context.
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@Renegade can I share some quick css fixes based on my observation?
I wasn’t active here much as a lurker before the change. But suddenly I find it so much harder to navigate and figure out. It’s definitely not intuitive that’s for sure.