I think you will find that Discourse tends to be actively developed and uses leading-edge browser features. most sites you visit on the 'net (BoingBoing included) tend to try to cater to the lowest-common-denominator and so many advanced features that would result in a more responsive, less resource-intensive are adopted extremely slowly because sites have no choice but to cater to clients that do not support them (and why waste time and money developing technologies for a site if only a subset of users can benefit?).
Discourse on the other hand has no issue deprecating browser versions as soon as their traffic drops sufficiently across the web, as part of their quest to be a low-resource, progressive-web-application.
As an example, Discourse already dropped support for IE:
Well, that’s just discrimination against minorities! /s
(Though there is a serious, wider point here. But this is not the place to kick off about that!)
I’ll await with interest to see if @codinghorror wishes to comment. I would prefer it if leading-edge co-existed with support for older stuff. Is it really so bad to consume a few extra ‘resources’ in order to do that? If Safari were a stand-alone browser I’d happily upgrade, but this approach is tantamount forcing me to upgrade a whole OS because of Apple’s insistence on making the browser inseparable from the OS (or would be if I didn’t have an alternative). That’s why I use it so rarely.
But probably there’s more El Capitan users using non-Safari browsers so that’s why Discourse sees Safari traffic with this version drop off so much.
ETA I see the edit you added - I’ll go to Discourse to see if they’ve announced anything similar re older Safari versions.
Can you point to any documentation for how the search strings work? I entered some terms and got a search alert, but the text in the alerting article doesn’t seem to contain any of my search strings. I wonder if non-alphanum characters might have some special significance…
EDIT: Update, the search strings seem to be doing ORed, stemmed searches, and/or is maybe stopworded. My search for “can opener” keeps returning random posts with “open”, “opening”, etc. I’ve tried putting “can opener” in quotes now; we’ll see if it does anything, or just completely breaks it…
Neil over there should be able to answer and questions on it as well.
Probably the most relevant bits are to enclose multiple words in quotes, and that it is identical to Discourse’s normal search, so you can use that to tailor your terms by checking the results.
Hi @orenwolf, a question on fonts: since about a week ago the font used on the main pages and articles appears to have changed. I always start off at https://boingboing.net/blog, and previously the font family was Arial, sans-serif. It now seems to be “Libre Baskerville”,serif:
It’s doing my eyes no good at all… Once in the BBS things are back to normal. Is this an intended change? Have checked in Chrome and Firefox. Thanks in advance!
I’m getting the font with bonus added serifs too. I cleared the Firefox data cache but that didn’t change it. I’m glad it’s not a permanent thing. I much prefer the Arial or related sans-serif font.
/s
. Not a massive issue, but a strain on the eyes in desktop browser when the evening rolls around…