Boing Boing’s had plain old blog comments since 2007. It’s time for something bigger and better. So welcome to BBS, our new discussion boards!
The boards run on Discourse, a completely new forum system created by Jeff Atwood, of Stack Exchange fame, and a small, dedicated team. Completely open-source (and under heavy development), it’s a perfect hybrid of forums and comments.
Like the old system, this’ll be a place to discuss items at BB and to expand upon what we’ve posted. We’ll be highlighting the best comments on Boing Boing, too.
As a forum, however, Discourse lets you create your own threads, link to your own work, and demolish serious culture without any help from us at all.
Boing Boing is also honored to be one of a few sites to participate in Discourse’s official development program, which means we get to be guinea pigs–and get to play with the latest features first.
Unlike our current system, it’s easy to control your own data and manage your account.
Your account is unique to Boing Boing, though when you register, Discourse will globally reserve your username for any other sites that later use their hosting service. If you have an existing BB account and more than 50 comments or so, your username has been reserved. Sign up with the same email you used to sign up for Boing Boing with, and it’s yours. If you have any troubles getting set up with your old username, get in touch and we’ll sort it out.
We’re currently formulating an update to our guidelines and our other policies to account for the changes. In the meantime, please continue to abide by the existing community guidelines.
BBS is under construction, so it’ll probably change in appearance (and in other respects) fairly rapidly. Suggestions are welcome – post them there!