Xenforo had, I think, 20 posts per page. What’s stopping you from jumping to the X-minus-40 post and reading from there?
It took me months to get used to the old format. Once I grew comfortable, we migrated.
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It is simply behaviouralism. Context window takes out the mental strain of compartmentalising context by self. That is why it was easier to navigate before. That is the fundamental of Limited Choice Principle which reduces cognitive burden on the user to make choices and allows them to focus more on interaction.
My arguments are solely on the basis of behavioural perspectives and how it may drive down interaction at structural patterned level in short term at least. I may be wrong overall but I find the cognitive burden to make the choice limiting my ability to engage in interaction here these days.
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The official chat plugin hasn’t been enabled yet. 
That will be the real chat interface.
I shudder to think of how things will devolve!
The first thing I stated when ‘Categories’ was enabled, in the other thread, was how bad the space utilisation was. The entire structure is compressed in the middle of the page, with all categories/tags clumped to one side with lots of spacing and no context, and with posts across tags listed on the right-hand side.
Not saying that Xenforo is not outdated, but the structure is much better defined where you can check the sub-sections, what it is about, how popular it is and what kind of discussion is ongoing.
Generally, Discourse doesn’t lend itself well to structure, with categories and tags trying to emulate it in some form as opposed to general hierarchical structure of forums. However, as is mentioned at multiple places, it is meant to be for free-flowing conversations with loose coupling.
It works well for support where people respond to topic at hand, with the issue resolved and then forget about it. Right now, without merging of posts as well, we have several chat-like comments just increasing the post count, without contributing a lot to the subject.
It is again a great technical platform but the design and user experience isn’t there, if the intention is to contribute to long form discussions on a topic of your choice or to follow specific topics of your interest.
I can keep coming here and scroll through content but not sure if users who see the same topics with infinite scrolling on login will be bothered to contribute much.
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The default structure is chatty enough, hope we don’t have a chat on chat. There is only so much chat a person can go through in a day.
Let’s have a chat within a chat @sama . Did you have enough chat? Or, do you want some more chat?
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Agree with most of what is written here. TE has become a Reddit instead of a Forum.
Think Admin had said he will work on the layout and incorporate some changes in due course. So I will wait a bit before checking-out.
I still think if we modify the layout and make it closer to a traditional forum, things will be more palatable despite the other nuisances.
It is not all bad because I really like the Edit history comparison option and ability to pin custom links on the left Sidebar.
But the current interface is really dislike-able. Infinite-scroll is the worst of all. On Desktop it is still tolerable but on mobile you have to click twice to get to the last post.
The ‘Activity’ option which is there in the Default theme is not present in the ‘Horizon’ theme. For me the Horizon theme looks better on the eye, hence I’m using that only.
This feels like a forced change and change for the sake of it littered with lot of bugs. But yeah, looks like Discourse will stay on and we have no other option 
Chatting will continue till the morale improves. 
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I haven’t created a new topic yet but was about to, and I am not sure how scrolling through a list of all topics with descriptions is an intuitive way to create one.
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Except @rsaeon no old timer is happy with the new interface. In fact, everyone has said that they are unhappy and engagement with the website has gone down. Can we make this drastic change and go back to Xenforo? I don’t mind losing a week’s worth of “chat”. I am sure most old timers wouldn’t either.
Come on, @Renegade, you can do it. We made a mistake by choosing Discourse. Let’s not be a victim of sunk-cost fallacy. I don’t even want to look at this website anymore honestly with the low contrast infinite scroll.
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I am with you from a sentiment perspective, but would also like to see if Discourse can be structured better, from a design and organisation perspective, using themes and plugins.
The performance gains from this movement can definitely not be denied.
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I joined in 2009, not sure whether myself in the list of old timer list, but personally i’m happy with this change since most of the forums i visit regularly are in discourse, openwrt, mikrotik, grandstream… just another one IBF still in older ways 
Again, i’m like how mikrotik is organised, if @Renegade can make like this, MikroTik community forum
it will be even great!
That looks so much better. Readability in current format has a taken a hit.
Specially when there is lot of whitespace left and right. (Not sure if there is a setting to fine tune that at user level ) .
We need further tuning of UI
yep mikrotik and a few others get rid of the wasted space but apart form that I am ok with discourse…
Apart from styling, how much is really different from what we had a month ago? Styling can be fixed with a few lines of css, I’m talking about content:
I’m just not seeing how jarring this change is made out to be. I find threads are much easier to find and engage with. More discussions end up on the main page instead of being tucked away under subsections or the sidebar.
hey now, I’m still pretty new around here, it’s only been a few years.
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People don’t like change. Honestly, I like the change for the most part. The only things I hate are:
- Infinite Scroll. The more I scroll, the laggy and harder to focus it gets. This is also mostly due to me not being able to adapt to this I guess lol
- This is true for any modern app, but the text editor slows down if I have the whole thread loaded in memory and it also heats up my laptop to the point that the fans start spinning lol
…which, granted, isn’t that big of a feat to do on an AMD64 laptop, but except for this forum, I can do pretty much everything else without the fans spinning, including YouTube and browsing other forums or using Signal or Discord (WhatsApp Web does make the fan spin, but the text editor/preview doesn’t lag there like it does here).
The first point means I absolutely hate browsing TE from Mobile, which is where most of my reading activity came from. The second point means I don’t open it as often on my laptop, which is where I like to type most of my posts.
So, the end result is that you don’t use it as much as you used to.
Fair, yeah. The fine print is just that I’m not using it because I’m basically being forced not to (scrolling nightmare in phone, heating up in laptop), not because I hate the change in UI itself.