Help Test the NEW Discuss/MODX-based forums for Launch

The new MODX Forums built on Discuss are nearly ready for launch. Shaun (splittingred) has done an incredible job on the new forum system with the theme implementation by Michael (piker). As you may know, we had considered and started working with Vanilla forums, but in the end we thought it was more important to have our own native forum application. Discuss is a MODX Add-on application that will be released to the Community. Please visit http://ttyl.modx.com/ and let us know what you think.

We need your help to test it before we launch it. We’re hoping your give it a workout for performance, connections, and issues missed in our earlier tests.

Some notes about testing:

• Your login is your MODX login, not your old SMF login ... finally all your MODX logins will reside under one account. Please let us know if there are any issues with this


• Also if your username on modx.com is different than your forums acct - you can merge them via logging in with your modx.com account, then clicking your username at the top right, and on the next page, "Merge Account" in the right-hand bar. Then follow the form there to merge your forums account.
• The import from SMF was done sometime in June, so your latest posts will not be present (full import will be done before live launch)
• No posts made in the ttyl.modx.com test instance will survive the public launch. It’s for testing and playing only and a re-import from SMF will occur.

Notes about Discuss features/functions:

• No more user-uploaded avatars. You can use a Gravatar associated with your email address if you want one: http://gravatar.com/
• PMs are really private discussions now and pretty cool. You can add people to them after the fact now.
• Email notifications are turned off right now, but they do work.
• Discuss will support threaded conversations, but for performance reasons we opted for a flat non-nested implementation.

Please report all bugs and feature requests at: http://bugs.modx.com/projects/discuss-skin/issues . Discussions and questions welcomed in this thread too.

Hmmm, getting a redirect error after logging in on Firefox6 and Chrome13 Mac OSX.7.

You’ll may need to logout then log back into modx.com in order to get a new session to make it work.

Also getting a redirect loop error using Chrome on Linux.

Looking sexy.

:D

The only thing I’m missing is some visual cue of who last posted in a certain forum (like what you see on the topic display). I really use that to see if I need to check back..

Same as above, redirect loop in Chrome on Linux, logged out of forums, redirect loop, logged back in, redirect loop, cleared all cookies, sessions in the browser, redirect loop

I’m really sorry to say that I’m not too fond of the forum design and layout. It’s a little too monochromatic, and there’s a lack of design elements to make it easy to distinguish between forums, posts, categories, etc. Overall, I find it a little hard on my eyes

I know that the MODx corporation has top-notch designers (the official site is beautiful) so I am somewhat embarrased to be critical

Otherwise, I am really happy to see Discuss being used as the system for the new forums. What better proof-of-concept could you ask for.

I was really hoping you would say it was XenForo. That system is amazing. Although I imagine as developers it’s probably quite hard to go with a closed source system.

The pages of posts are nice and clear and laid out well. The list of forums and topics I find is quite long and undistinct... feel it needs something to make them a bit more... ’different’. Not sure how. I’m not a good designer! Maybe having the picture of the topic origintor as an icon like XenForo - that works well.

Only main issue... style issues, see attached images.

(I’m on Firefox 3.6.20)

@Mark H. The visual cue for unreads in the forums is that all read posts ligther and the unread posts are darker. https://skitch.com/jaygilmore/fx5q6/modx-important-news

@shamblett did you clear your cache? I know (from experience and reports) Chrome on any platform is notorious for caching issues. If that’s not it. We’ll need to know more about your network and perhaps its a dns issue. Are you on a proxy server?

@cyclissimo don’t be embarrassed about your critique. It was fully intended to be ultra minimalist. Content first, less "forum bling". We accept it may not be everyone’s taste but don’t apologize ever for a valid opinion.

@hostile17 it’s Discuss a fully native MODX forum. We will certainly have some tweaks and corrections to make. BTW Firefox 6 came out this week. Not quite sure why you’re still on FX 3.6.x as it is super slow in comparison.

Keep the comments and feeback coming folks. It’s appreciated. Test everything out. Push buttons and report spam etc. we would rather it break now than when we go live. Keep in mind your testing will make it rock solid for when we roll it out to the community as an add-on.

Somewhat on-topic, the Discuss add-on docs say this:

... It is still in early alpha, and is strongly recommended that you not use it on public sites.

Is this still a valid statement, given that Discuss seems to be ready for prime time?