Since 2012, we’ve had the same forums. While the rest of the site got updated, the forums kept chugging along. Today that is changing, and it will have huge implications for the rest of the site. Technically, we’ve replaced our old forums application with a totally new application, Discourse. What makes this truly exciting is we are overhauling other key parts of the Tindie experience with Discourse too.
Using Discourse as our new forums will seem lightyears ahead of the old forums. There are honestly too many amazing features to list in this post. To preserve the old forums, there will be a link in the Forums header. The one caveat being users won’t be able to submit new content to them. However we are incredibly excited about this change – new forums, new topics, new conversations!
We’re also adding Discourse to our new blog and will be utilizing it for our comments. This will allow for more rich conversations on our blog posts – especially as we ramp up our blogging efforts. This is on the way, but we wanted to give everyone a heads up.
But wait, there’s more!
We’re also announcing the return of private messaging – also powered by Discourse! Many moons ago we had a private messaging system which was retired in favor of public Q&A. While the public Q&A has been great, many conversations shouldn’t be had in public. This will be perfect for those situations.
With all of the work we have put into this integration, we are incredibly excited to unveil it to the community. Updating the forums, blog comments and private messaging are just the tip of the iceberg. There very well may be more integrations in the future, but this is a great start!
