A new Discussions is ready and open for everyone to use!
As mentioned we fully migrated the existing content to the new platform to provide a seamless experience. Additionally, the new platform offers a variety of new features and enhancements.
In particular, you will find that sharing images and code snippets is much easier. You will continue to have single sign-on from FlightAware.com (so, no separate login/password). While the look and feel will be significantly different, we are excited that our new platform will offer a much improved overall experience and improved usability.
If you are unfamiliar with Discourse here is a helpful page to get familiar with posting/edit/navigating the new Discourse Tips and Tricks.
As always we are here to help, any questions please feel free to reach out to the FlightAware team!
Thank you for participating in the FlightAware discussions site!
Confusing and un-friendly looking.
First page consists of two vertical narrow columns. Itās not a newspaperā¦
The sub-forums are just like phrases with little squares in between, no structure there (as tree, folders).
Even n the top of this page there are two words: FlightAware and Announcements with no visible relation between them.
I donāt like it.
Personally, Iāve found Discourse to be the easiest to use, most friendly, of all of the so-called ācommunityā platforms that I use. It seems to be pretty popular as I have found several of my ācommunitiesā migrating to it in the last year or so.
I donāt like it ā¦
Is this the ānew standardā ?? It seems very uncomfortable to me.
It takes to much time to find what Im looking for, not user-friendly ā¦
I agree with MrCali. The experience here has gone in the dumpster. It seems that FlightAware staff clearly does not understand their target audience very well. I wonder if they will design and build that fancy new office suite in Houston without first seeking guidance from those that will actually be using it?
Maintenance and backend version updates of phpBB had become increasingly problematic for us over the years, so our primary goal was to move towards a hosted solution that still permitted the necessary level of single-sign-on integration. Security and antispam protections were also important aspects that phpBB has always struggled with.
Discourse is a modern and actively-developed offering that is being used by an increasing number of other forums and it has all of the major features that we were looking for. Since it is a hosted solution with commercial support it actually reduces costs for us by not requiring us to dedicate our own IT staff towards maintaining it (which none of our IT staff actually wanted to do, nor enjoyed doing, because of its fragile backend nature).
We recognize that the user interface is significantly different from phpBB, but we hope everyone will take the time to learn the new environment and recognize its strengths. We will continue to tweak some of the styling and settings that are available, so things may continue to improve over time. Thanks
I will continue to provide my received data to FlightAware but I wonāt be participating in the forums any more. Iāve tried to use this abortion of a platform on other sites and Iāve never found the experience to be anything other than unacceptable.
I moderate a large UK tech forum with around 130,000 users. We recently migrated from Vb to Xenforo and the most important thing was to keep the user experience as close to the original as possible. This platform is a mistake, a punch in the face to the users.
This sums up my feelings as well. I understand wanting to move to a hosted type solution so that maintenance becomes someone elseās headache, but not at the cost of usability by the end user.
Itās been a fun ride and I will miss what this forum used to be.
