I don’t think so honestly. Discourse is solid and tons of communities are switching to Discourse rather than moving away. Then again, we do have a bit of a special audience.
That’s a no brainer. A clean start is very likely kill to the community. It can’t be too difficult honestly and I won’t mind contributing to a few dirty scripts
Sounds like the only major concern is the name. There are two roads here. Hostballs is a quirky name. It’s like the fun, nice, but a bit of an oddball kid on the playground. I’d say it’s not that professional of a name, but then again they made a multi-million dollars production company out of alternative words for cock bite so hey who knew.
In the end, you can go the more professional (and traditional-naming-scheme) route and compete with WHT/LET/LES/vpsB (wow haven’t thought of that in a long time) or continue on as planned. Also, those methods are a bit outdated. I mean vpsB at one point was trying to compete with the other communities and I can give an ear full about that (looking back).
I’d suggest looking into a new name but still one that’s hilarious/quirky but a little less testicles-in-the-name.
I keep thinking of… GoDaddy.
@Jarland @Mason I have a question regarding the software side…
I’ve seen several people moan about Discourse both here and on LET/LES but it looks to me like NodeBB is very similar… I’m putting my project manager hat on for a second, but do we know what people dislike about Discourse? All I’ve seen are general “meh its Discourse” style comments.
I’m sure there are many different reasons people may dislike it, but a number of them will probably be the same - from my (admittedly 5 minute) look at NodeBB it seems very similar and it would be a shame to rush to a new product and risk all the good parts of this incarnation of the community if the same issues are present in NodeBB.
AyPapi will work.
Thread scrolling is the only repeating complaint I’ve seen that is Discourse-specific. Mainly the Ball Pit thread that everyone loves, people seem to feel obligated to keep up with it or scroll bit by bit (not using the side scroll bar) to skip to the latest.
Pagination seems a strong preference of many.
It outright harasses us shitposters nearly consistently with it’s passive-aggressive shit. Might as well keep it.
NodeBB has up/downvote, though. And you can turn off endless scroll … Not sure if that matters to me, though … 
A bit late to the party, but after scrolling through the new one I would say I prefer Discourse.
By all means, re brand if you think it could help in any way, but keep Discourse and the data. 
^ this. Perhaps we should reflect this in a poll of some sort. I like Discourse and if you want pagination you can just disable your JavaScript and get it over with… That said, it can’t be too difficult to fall back to pagination with a plugin of some sort since it is default Discourse behavior for when JavaScript is disabled. In other words, it is existing functionality.
Annoyingly, it’s not possible at all. I don’t mind the infinite scroll, but it’s the main complaint we get. I actually had no idea that that is default behaviour when JS is disabled.
I don’t have time on my hands currently to look into it but the timeline is a component injected by Discourse. If it is not injected it’ll fall back to regular pagination. No clue how Discourse handles injections though, it’s something I’d have to look into.
I haven’t had the time to manually look through Discourse’s source, I’ve just Googled it and found that apparently there isn’t an option. If we have to manually modify any source files, it’ll break on update.
Sure, but one might be able to hook into those functions with a plugin of some sort and/or modifying the DOM.
Going off of what I’ve read, it’s simply not doable regardless of plugin usage. That’s not to say it’s absolutely not possible, it just looks unlikely. That paired with the fact that there isn’t an existing solution, despite interest. You can read more here.
The only way to make pagination work would be to build a new frontend with support for it since Discourse’s API supports it, but that’s not going to happen. There’s nothing bad about infinite scrolling in my opinion, people just don’t like change.
This. A 1000 times.
That said, Discourse marks visitors without JavaScript as crawlers and as a result loads the crawler layout. You can enforce this by appending “?print” to the URL but this layout doesn’t allow you to login, sign up or whatever.
However, for the current layout, with a simple JavaScript plugin you can easily hide the “.timeline-scrollarea” and replace it with a few buttons and dispatch the appropriate events to load new / older posts. The old and new posts are already removed from the DOM by default.
My 2 cents: the scrolling makes it so much better than the pagination shit. Yes it might take a moment to realize the shortcuts like the mover bar in the right or the smart handling of clicking on the logo to go to the top. However… esp. On mobile nowadays very much prefer this.
Just my opinion, thought some positive feedback can’t hurt 
Honestly,
Name is just a name. It is the forum that makes it different.
As for the software, I beleive and I might be just the only person, while I love the functionality (copy pasting without losing style), it is unique and takes a bit longer to get used to.
While most of us don’t have any issue learning, I can see how a new user would signup/browse, looks at the website and they are like fuck this. I am out. Because we are like this gated community, where we are content with ourselves and happy as it is. But if we keep the gate closed for general population who are used to with vb/mybb/vanilla, why would they bother coming to HB.
And a 2c, what is HB? I never figured out the vision @Jarland. And I don’t mean that in a negative way brother.
WHT is the defacto industry standard. LE thrives on deals. LES became a mix of deal and fun discussion. Hb is just discussion. I think it is time to find our niche.
Honestly instead of focusing on brand name or design. We should really focus on finding our target audience, who are not trying to find a balance between LE and WHT.
Kinda like how mxroute came in and filled a void that we never knew we had.
Frankly to have a place to chill that was on topic to hosting but left all the toxic BS behind. You know how a newcomer pops in and everyone just piles on them like “how dare you enter my house you high school summer host piece of shit” (and could literally be a 45 year old guy who’s been in the industry for two decades). I’m tired of that shit, and it couldn’t be trained out without a change of venue as I learned the hard way from trying.
@Wolveix Couldn’t go to bed before throwing this together 
. Don’t mind the crappy code, it’s a quick proof of concept and I’ve been working since 6 AM without any break so I really cba. I’m on copy/paste mode.
$('.topic-timeline').hide();
$('.timeline-container')
.append($('<button id="test-button" class="btn btn-primary">First</button>')
.click(function(e) {
$('.timeline-padding').first().trigger(jQuery.Event("click", { pageY: 0 }));
}))
.append(
$('<button id="test-button" class="btn btn-primary" style="margin-left: 20px;">Last</button>')
.click(function(e) {
$('.timeline-padding').first().trigger(jQuery.Event("click", { pageY: 2300 }));
})
);