Looks great! I’m glad the Xojo team went with this forum software 
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I’m a little disappointed myself. Discourse is ok, but I’ve always thought it was slightly unpleasant using a discourse forum. I’m on several of them and they are functional, but I tend to spend a lot less time on them and use them less than other forums. I haven’t even spent enough time to figure out why that is. I do know that I think the little badges and bots that some of them use seem childish and remind me of grab the coin type games so I know that’s one aspect of it.
I agree that Discourse takes some getting used to but I find it the best of all of them.
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The badges stuff is a waste of time, and I see it’s no easier than before to have a forum picture.
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I think most of it is the layout and way things are organized just doesn’t feel right to me. I find I can get around on a lot of the older forum software quite a bit easier. EsoTalk was nice in that regard although I realize it was lacking in other areas.
To be fair most of the places I frequent that have upgraded their forums have been a step backward for me. Might be the white space design trend or something. Less clutter seems to be less useful when scanning through lots of posts.
I have been on a site that was upgraded to XenForo for a bit now and it seems pretty good. There were a few growing pains after the upgrade, but I find the layout to be more useful and it was pretty easy to get used to. I don’t know if I will ever get used to discourse in the same way. It hasn’t happened yet and I’ve been on at least one discourse forum for years now.
I think Discourse uses Gravatar for profile images. It’s a great (free) service.
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Having worked with XenForo in a professional capacity, I never recommend it. The back end felt over-cluttered, bordering on unusable at times.
I changed to the Dark Theme in my preferences and looks great
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I have no experience with actually running XenForo, just as a user the one forum I’m on that uses it works well for me. I’m sure there are trade offs to all these forum software packages. But in my experience all the upgrades from the old school stuff to newer stuff that have occurred on forums I’m a member of have been worse IMO except for the XenForo one.
I get most people find the older style forums lack a certain design aesthetic, but in terms of keeping up with topics and just getting in to see what’s new and quickly scroll through sections to see if anything is relevant, the older style has been better for me. I don’t usually care to interact much with the forum itself. I mainly want to see if there is anything new I want to read and/or comment on.
Well, you can also change your preferences to use smaller fonts, which also reduces the whitespace to some degree. That may help you. On all of the Discourse forums I’m a member of, I always set my text size preference to “Smallest”.
To set your font size preference (or any other):
1. Click your avatar at top-right, then click your display name in the resulting popup.
2. Select Preferences in the menu.
3. Click interface in the left-hand navigation.
But it appears to require me to have a Wordpress account (whatever that may be). Why would I want to do that?
Because it is convenient and ubiquitous. Gravitar is used by lots of sites, including GitHub and StackOverflow. You set it up once and it’s used automatically everywhere.
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Gravitar may be but what has that to do with Wordpress?
Gravatar and Wordpress are both owned by Automattic. All Automattic sites and services use Wordpress accounts.
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i saw email notify is on by default, it will create a lot of spam …
Happy enough. Disappointed we lost location though. It was handy to know when to expect people to reply
People can still put one in their profile
Thanks for pointing that out. Turning it off now.
I can’t see how being convenient and ubiquitous means it should be mandatory… 
I want control of where my personal picture is stored, so I won’t define one in this forum (yet, anyway), sorry.
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