I much prefer DHO to /r/streamentry etc but find myself not reading here because of the forum software. Liferay doesn't support mobile at all.

Posting a suggestion here to consider a switch to https://www.discourse.org/

• It's mobile first
• It's free and open source
• Community based moderation (trust system)
• It's actively maintained by a respected programmer (Jeff Atwood) & team.

I think the popularity of DHO would really take-off if this was implemented.

I post here from my mobile device quite a bit. Why do you say this place doesn't support mobile? DhO may not have the prettiest and most elegant mobile interface but it is usable.

I should say, wasn't designed with mobile in mind.

Consider the difference between reading a discourse forum and reading on liferay on mobile: https://imgur.com/gallery/EdLKTIf

Navigation buttons and interactions on liferay are not designed for mobile.

There wasn't much mobile development when Liferay (the forum software here) was popular, and mobile-first idea came much later. It's quite a project to migrate this system and its data to another software. Also some people prefer certain features on this forum to other forums. I myself am comfortable with this forum, and its occasional problem, and I think the energy and time to migrate it to other softwares can be used to more useful things than that.

As a hobbyist who 's done a forum migration in the past, I agree that it's time consuming and needs effort (in my case there were a lot of trials and errors and it was just a major upgrade of the same forum platform). On the other hand, a community can't stay with an old forum version and platform for ever and the reason for that, apart for the lack of new features, is lack of security.

I'm a relatively new member of DhO (aprox a year) and I find it really difficult to read (I usually read instead of actively participating) this forum from my mobile. I honestly wish it had a responsive interface! In addition to that I wish it had other important features, like private message notifications etc. I still wonder wether people that never replied to my PM, ever saw the messages or not!

Just to be clear, I am not writing this message in order to complain or... I'm just posting in order to encourage the migration to another plaftform. I wish I could actively help on that, but my knowledge is limited. However I believe that most of us here will be happy to donate so that a proffesional can do the job!

Sure, this is just my thoughts on why Dho is not as popular as the content deserves.

I don't think there is a positive side to staying still while the world changes. Desktop traffic is less than 50% in the US and declining: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/united-states-of-america

Being available on mobile (in acceptable form) is the best way for users to build a habit of checking this site instead of reddit.

Liferay is also quite bizarre in other areas, why on the "message board home" do I see threads with a "last reply" 4 years ago: https://prnt.sc/sxb51u

I agree that Liferay... well, it sucks. That said, it's up to the person who founded and funds the DhO to make these decisions. You can send that person, Daniel Ingram, a PM and I'm sure he'd appreciate your input.

I didn't want to bug Daniel directly via PM. I thought better to throw it open and get others ideas.

A really cool aspect of Dho (and AwakeNetwork ) is the practice logs, something reddit isn't suited for.

Anyway, since liferay is such niche software (oddly liferay is based about 5 minutes walk from my old house) there is unfortunately no converter to discouse. So it would need manual work. If Daniel and others were in agreement I'm sure that money could be raised to hire a competent developer. I manage a development team but am unfortunately not a developer myself.

I think I recall in a podcast Daniel stated his cost of running Dho is around $600/year (I might be wrong here). I am certain it could be ran using discourse on the $10/m VPS from DigitalOcean.

It require manual work and a lot of work. Months of full time work.

Yep.

Once upon a time we tried to merge DhO and AwakeNetwork to take advantage of the more user and mobile-friendly AN software. Daniel asked the DhO members if they would support the merger. The answer was a resounding "No!" or maybe even "Hell no!" The merger would have had the effect of reuniting DhO, AwakeNetwork, Dharma Forum Refugee Camp, and two editions of Kenneth Folk Dharma. All the schisms would thus be reversed.

Sadly, that may never happen.

Fortunately, it didn't happen. If I recall correctly, one of the major objections was that the new forum would have had much more restrictive content policies and would have prohibited discussion of psychedelics.

I'm also skeptical that just combining fora would reverse the schisms, which have more fundamental roots.

Seeing the DhO on Discourse instead of this broken and buggy software would be a dream come true. It wouldn't have to take months - it could just start from scratch there. This board could stay up as is, but not have new posts.

Where's your sense of adventure? Of humor?

Yep that's what they did with another forum I am familiar with, they just left the old version up and put up a notice to move to new one.

Old forum: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp
New forum: https://forum.language-learners.org/

This has the added benefit that you won't lose any referral traffic from Google because all the old links stay working.

Hahaha... hard to tell your very dry sarcasm over a message board. I should have known by now!