This is the place to offer feedback on your experience using Discourse, the forums system we are testing out as a possible contender for the MST3K community.
We are hoping that you, as a select group of testers, will come in here and experiment with Discourse and let us know what you do and don’t like about it.
You can use this post to offer broad general feedback. See the other posts in this category for ideas for other more specific areas.
So far, so good. I’m a limited techie type, so if I can navigate things, then you’ve hit the simplicity sweet spot.
Hi! When trying to use the GIF search button, you’ll get the error message:
Missing or wrong Giphy API Key set. Ask the site admin to follow the install instructions at Discourse Gifs component - theme - Discourse Meta.
Yes! Apparently we need to select a GIF library to search from – it’s on my to-do list. 
This looks like what Woot! uses for their forums.
You can 
things and use bold and italics. This is approximately 9 years ahead of kickstarter’s comments, so ya got that going for ya. No major complaints, and the discobot tutorial of features was nice. Never had a forum introduce itself so thoroughly before.
Tutorial search for capybara turned up 0 results but scrolling up found it.
So I’ve never understood Discourse, but does this mean we’ll only be able to post gifs in the group library? If so, it’d be nice if there was a way to offer new gifs we create.
Or I just don’t understand it. A real possibility here. 
I like just about everything so far. The one thing that seems odd is the use of topics under each forum. For example in the “Cheesy Movies” Forum, there is a topic called “Favorite Cheesy Movies of All Time”. The rest of the topics listed actually seem to be intended to be replies to the first topic rather than what should be considered new topics.
…Maybe. That’s a good idea, and I’m going to investigate making it happen. But yes, the way it’s currently set up, you’re limited to the library, which I don’t love either.
I just discovered there’s a 20-character minimum for posts, which seems odd. Maximum character limits I understand, but are minimums a normal thing?
Someone else brought this up and I have a note to investigate the logic behind it. I’m pretty sure I can change it, I just want to know the reasoning for making that the default first.
I assume it’s meant to discourage one word answers and short, junky posts. It surgery wouldn’t did any good vs spammers. No lack of words from them.
Is there a way to load pages with a fixed number of posts (50 per page, 100 per page, etc.) rather than using the “infinite scroll” logic that just keeps adding new ones as you scroll? Pages can get really unwieldy that way.
Also, is there a way to preview a post before posting it?
I like the forum even though I don’t have the hang of it yet. I’m having fun playing with everything.
I see now the post preview is right here alongside the posting window. Doh!
The infinite scroll seems to be an intentional aspect of the design for Discourse – but I agree it would be useful to cap it somewhere. I’ll see if that’s in the customization controls somewhere (there are a MILLION customization options, which is one reason why Ivan and I liked Discourse as an option to start with.)
< onlyhalfjoking > Needless to say, there needs to be a counter of some sort prominently featured on the home page. It doesn’t need to count anything in particular … as long as the numbers occasionally get higher. < /onlyhalfjoking >
Every time the counter flips, a MSTie gets their wings?
The graceful theme makes it very difficult to read the light grey text on the white background.