Welcome to the new commenting space for SCW and The Eyewall!
We’re so glad you’ve joined us! If you’re reading this, it’s because you care about the conversations that happen below @Eric’s and @Matt’s forecasting posts. This move to Discourse is about making those conversations easier to follow, easier to moderate, and—hopefully—even more useful to everyone who turns to Space City Weather and The Eyewall during major weather events.
Here are some things you can do to get started:
Add a profile picture to your forum profile to personalize things a bit!
Join a seasonal group, and gain a neat little badge to show off which of Houston’s seasons you think is best!
Get to know the community by browsing discussions that are already happening here. (This forum is pretty new, so there may only be a few threads for the first few days or weeks!) When you find a post interesting, informative, or entertaining, use the 
to show your appreciation or support!
Contribute to the daily Space City Weather and The Eyewall forecast threads by commenting, sharing your own perspective, or asking questions. Before jumping in, please review the Community Guidelines.
We’ve pulled together a list below of what we think will be the most commonly asked questions about the new commenting system. Read on to see if your particular question is in the list!
Why have we moved from WordPress native comments to Discourse?
SCW & E/W have used native WordPress comments since the sites were started—for SCW, this means since 2015. WP’s native comment solution is easy to configure and maintain, is “low friction” for readers to use (that is, it doesn’t require very many steps to leave a comment), and, crucially, it’s free.
However, the moderation tools are extremely rudimentary. WordPress let us use a filter list to hold keyword-matching posts for moderation, but that’s about it. We gained some additional leverage against the worst trolls (the ones spamming homophobic/racist slurs and death threats) by doing some blocking upstream at Cloudflare, but that’s a lot like killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
A better solution was to migrate to a forum like Discourse—something designed for real online communities, with robust moderation tools.
Why now? Why the sudden move?
The underlying cause is obvious: It’s 2025, and people are angry about a lot of stuff. That anger bleeds through everywhere. We want our comments to not be like that, which has meant spending more and more time each day monitoring them.
Now, with Discourse as our commenting system, SCW and E/W staff can reclaim a significant amount of time previously lost to dealing with a small but growing number of (presumably) grown-ass adults who insist on posting inappropriate, abusive, and disruptive content online. This is a net-positive for everyone.
Why change the entire commenting system? Can’t we just use WordPress accounts?
Having everyone sign up for local WordPress accounts on the SCW & E/W server would have broken or bypassed the caching strategy we use to remain fast and responsive under heavy load, since logged-in local accounts are served uncached pages by design. Working around this would have required a lot of technical effort and would still have involved performance trade-offs, and that’s not a good thing. Our top priority always has to be ensuring SCW and E/W are online and responsive during high-traffic weather events.
On the other hand, decoupling the comments from WordPress and sticking them on their own server doesn’t impact the main SCW and E/W sites at all, and if for some reason the forums themselves break under load during a storm, the main sites will continue unaffected.
Why Discourse?
We settled on Discourse for our community both because it’s a product in active development with a large existing install base and plenty of support, and also because it comes with a rich and powerful set of community management tools.
One of those tools will be particularly helpful: community flagging. We strongly encourage you, as trusted readers, to flag posts that are inappropriate, abusive, or off-topic. Your flags will help keep discussions constructive and useful.
Why does it take so many steps to post now?
We’re interested in a community where people contribute meaningfully—not just drop in, toss out something inflammatory, and disappear. That’s why posting now requires an account. It’s a little bit more work up-front, but it makes for a more responsible, more respectful conversation.
If you want to post, now you have to click the link to come here to the forum and log into a persistent account. Your posts will then, if certain conditions are met—such as having an established account, no recent moderation issues, and sufficient positive community engagement—appear below the daily forecast post, where the native WordPress comments used to show up.
Right now, we’re showing up to 20 replies from Discourse below each SCW/Eyewall post. That number can be adjusted as the community wishes—feel free to voice your opinion via the Forum Feedback category!
Are my account details safe here?
Absolutely. Discourse is an actively maintained and widely trusted platform, and we’re not screwing around when it comes to anyone’s security or privacy. Please review our Privacy Policy for details.
My post isn’t showing up on the main SCW or Eyewall pages!
It’s possible your account is too new, or has created too many posts that were flagged by others, or otherwise fails to meet the conditions we’ve set for eligibility to be auto-embedded below Eric’s or Matt’s forecast. If you want your posts to be auto-embedded on the homepage, focus on making contributions to the community that other readers value.
Are the old comments on old SCW and Eyewall posts gone forever?
Fear not! They’re all still there, but they’re not shown right now because of the way we’re connecting Discourse to Wordpress. This will change!
There are a few different ways to wire up Discourse for embedding, and we’ve chosen a method that prioritizes keeping new comments as up-to-date as possible on the homepage. Unfortunately, one side effect of this approach is that it replaces the section of each post that previously showed native WordPress comments—so the old threads aren’t presently being displayed.
This is something we fully intend to fix. The old comment threads are part of the history and character of SCW and The Eyewall, and we want to make sure they’re preserved. Once we find a clean way to bring them back—preferably a way that doesn’t introduce weird caching delays!—we’ll make sure they’re all displayed in archival form.
Why can’t I make new threads anywhere except Forum Feedback?
Currently we’re using Discourse as a replacement for WordPress comments—and that is all. If there’s enough demand for it, we’ll consider adding some additional weather-focused community discussion categories. If you’ve got thoughts along these lines, Forum Feedback is the place to post them!
So what can I do?
For now, every time Eric or Matt post on SCW or E/W, a new thread (a “topic,” in Discourse parlance) corresponding to the post and containing the post’s contents is created in either the Space City Weather category or The Eyewall category. Folks are welcome to discuss the day’s post in that thread.
I don’t like this! I want to post the old way!
I get it! I really do. Like, who moved my cheese, right?
Here’s the thing: We know change is difficult, but we genuinely believe this change will make things better for everyone who values the mission that SCW and E/W serve.
All of us here behind the scenes at SCW and The Eyewall hope you’re on board with that! If not, then no worries—both sites are still free for anyone to read, and they always will be. It’s only the commenting system that’s changing.
I do like this! I want there to be more places to post!
Weigh in with your thoughts by making a new topic in the Forum Feedback category and let us know—we want to be as responsive to the community as possible, with the understanding that adequately moderating a wide-open discussion forum with hundreds of people posting is a significant time commitment even with Discourse’s tools.
I read on as directed but my particular question wasn’t in the list!
Create a new topic in the Forum Feedback category and let’s talk!