@codinghorror said:
If you just want to know if someone is a newbie, new users have light grey usernames.
Ah, so it's 50 Shades of Usernames... But seriously, how is having an undiscoverable feature indicated by a slight color change (and a difficult-to-read color at that) better than having an explicit, quantifiable piece of text?
Jeff, I get what you're trying to do. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you've actually built a pretty decent article commenting system. A forum, however, is a different beast, and you're sacrificing usability to fit your Grand Unifying Theory of web discussion. Trying to shoehorn both modes of discussion into a one-size-fits-all interface is distracting at best, user-hostile at worst.
There are some great features here -- for one, the ability to automatically pick up where you left off reading is killer. But that could be just as easily applied to a paginated forum view as an infiniscroll of comments. And all the little things that people are used to from pretty much every other forum ever -- pagination, post count, timestamps -- are just visual styling. It can't be too much to ask for some configuration options (meaning built in to the software, not "go write a plugin").
Maybe installing Discourse in a new site that has no preconceived notions of a web forum would go more smoothly, I don't know. I just think you're uprooting long-held expectations for the sake of being different. Sometimes being radically different is good and/or necessary; I don't think this is one of those cases.