Originally Posted by Lowengard 
I propose closing out and archiving all those large, unwieldy discussions. While many of them contain useful information, reading through thousands, or even mere hundreds, of posts takes time and energy, and so cuts into what should be the principal occupation of anyone reading them: a flourishing freelance practice of [you name it.].
Those of us who are historically minded might like access to these older discussions but, in many cases, information and standards have changed enough that I don't recommend relying on either business management or writing/editing information from even 3 years ago.
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Thank you. I would like to support this decision in closing very old discussions. I will have to go forum-to-forum eventually to make sure some very old subjects cannot be brought back to life. The beauty of the new platform is that it is based on new/recent posts being displayed first, in a continuous flow of discussions and questions that members then can segregate further by subject. This will naturally help eliminate older subjects and promote new ones.
As for the new software, Discourse isn't as simple as I thought initially. Requires Ruby on Rails, so that means getting a brand new server that will support it. Vanilla doesn't have that problem. We will still try to port TF into Discourse (things are being done in a test-server environment) and in the meantime there is still space to talk about the pros and cons and see what people gravitate towards.
My least favorite part of Discourse is the thread information pane that is located below the original post of every discussion (attached). To me it seems like a less useful piece of information. Vanilla doesn't have it, but then the way you work with the thread is more traditional. Overall, Discourse does look like a more interesting framework.
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