Oh dear! Thanks for your kind words, but that’s not a battle that need to be fought on my account. This is basically a non-issue. I could fix it in a couple of different ways, but neither of them is particularly palatable to me. That said, I’m glad you enjoy my presence, and I’m not going anywhere, I’m just dialing it down a little here.
I’ve mentioned before in a couple of other threads that I’m finding it impossible to keep up here due to the increased traffic and decreased time I have got available. This is not a BB or Discourse issue; it’s purely a RatMan problem. Real life sometimes intrudes. I’m just spread too thinly right at the moment, and something has to give. I apologize if I gave the impression that I’m basing an entirely personal decision on a software change. I’m not-- it’s just the impetus to make a change that I need to make anyway.
On the one hand, the way I use BBS is pretty uncommon, and I can understand why they don’t want to troubleshoot it. But the only thing that’s keeping me a Regular here is the ability to browse and like messages in the moments that I can grab away from other things. For example, I use the phone browser to surf around here for the ten minutes while I’m waiting for the kids to come out of school, or on the tablet when we’re all sitting around in the living room after dinner. I’m in and out of here constantly but briefly throughout the day, and in the past, I’ve used my Android systems for that. I only post from my Windows systems (desktop or laptop) and that’s unlikely to change.
I’m mildly (only MILDLY!) concerned that Discourse has decided to buy into the “Chrome is the official browser of Android” policy. On one hand, that’s a business decision that Jeff and his associates at CDCK Inc. and Discourse.org have made. If it makes sense to them not to support a very popular standards-compliant browser, that’s their business, and I’m not going to argue with it any more than I just have. I use it in an unusual way, and I acknowledge that fact. But as you probably know, I have a historical connection to Firefox, even as I disagree with many of the choices Mozilla has made in the last few years. Yet at the same time, I’ve started reconsidering exactly what information I share with Google. I’m not a big fan of the choices they have made for Chrome in general and Android Chrome in particular. But c’est la vie… this works well enough. It’s a social media site, not a bank. The issue I see has been reported, but it probably won’t affect anyone else, so let’s move along.
I would say the one gripe I have with Discourse is the lack of transparency when changes are made. Versioning is deliberately hidden from users, and changes are deployed simultaneously, indeed prior to, notification of those changes. That’s not specific to Discourse; I see it in many systems these days, and it’s very obviously a conscious decision. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, but it’s not the way I deploy changes myself, and I personally don’t care for it.
All that said, and getting back to the recent changes… One very hard thing for programmers to deal with is that sooner or later, you need to stop changing things. Unnecessary UI changes just annoy the users, even when they seem relatively minor. This can be a very hard thing to grasp; programmers want to program, and it’s hard to know when to stop, especially when 99% of your users will never say a word about it, or even acknowledge that anything is different.
I am actually considering switching the mommy-blog over to Discourse. I’ve downloaded and installed it, and I’m playing around with some changes that I feel are necessary for that environment. (trolley flag FTW!) And there are a good many things I don’t understand yet. Also, there are a ton of configuration options that we don’t see as users here on the BBS. It’s a very flexible system, and I can remain a fan while being mildly unhappy with minor changes.
Anyway, sorry for the length of this, I seem to have written more than I intended. (So what else is new…) 
