Good day, Happy Mutants.
This evening, we're going to be saying goodbye to Disqus, our current comment system here at Boing Boing.
We thought hard about what to replace it with, and decided that it was time to do something completely different: something that gives readers more creative latitude, but keeps a bit of the established order.
Naturally, we decided upon a bulletin board system, accessible exclusively via dial-up modem or TELNET.
Kidding! We've opted for Discourse, the new forum system created by Jeff Atwood, one of the brilliant minds behind Stack Exchange, and a small group of similarly talented friends.
Completely open-source (and still under heavy development), Discourse acts as a neat hybrid of forums and comments. It's designed to offer the most useful features of a modern discussion platform, yet remain simple to read and easy to use for everyday readers.
With forums, you're not limited to discussion of our posts. You can create your own discussions and tell us how you'd like the forums to develop, as well as comment on the threads that we create ourselves.
At Boing Boing itself, the best comments will often appear under the posts, much as they do now.
Discourse represents a clean break from our current commenting system. You'll have to register anew to post there, though we've already reserved the usernames of anyone who has posted more than a handful of comments.
If they're not claimed within a few weeks, these Discourse usernames will be released.
Your old comments are backed up, by the way. We've exported them from Disqus, and imported them back into Boing Boing itself, which runs on WordPress. That way, even after Disqus is turned off here, all our old posts will still include your comments.
Our forums will be under construction for a while, so will probably change in appearance fairly rapidly. Better mobile compatibility is top of the list.
If you're clever, you might already be able to figure out the URL and sneak in early. We'll announce it officially and flip the switch tonight. Any thoughts? Put them in the comments below — or wait until later and create a forum thread instead.
UPDATE: Launched! Enjoy bbs.boingboing.net, our new forums.
