Well…that was easy! Have been reading Eric’s posts since the early blog days, but could never fully figure out the ‘other commenting system’. Am a bit rusty, as I haven’t posted on a forum in years, but hope to be able to join in now and then. As ever, thank you for the weather info, and now, thank you for Discourse!
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I mean, honestly, I get it. This was a choice that we’ve been debating internally for months. Given that the Wordpress comments were becoming unsustainable, we looked at a bunch of different ways to flip—including something like a SCW Discord.
We landed on Discourse versus something like Discord for a couple of reasons. The first, and biggest, is because a forum like Discourse encourages thoughtful, slow engagement and long-term commitment. We want commenters who want to be here.
The second is because of the desire to run our own platform. Discord—to continue to use them as an example—is a hosted service with a questionable privacy track record and more or less impenetrable finances. OTOH, we’re self-hosting this Discourse instance on AWS EC2, right next to the SCW and Eyewall virtual servers. I believe very firmly in making sure SCW runs its own community, without having third parties involved. (Well, any more third parties than necessary—everything we do is hosted on AWS.)
Either way, I’m glad you commented, and I hope you’ll stick around and see how things go!
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Woot! I’m in like Flynn!
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Looks great here! Very clean design, good job! 
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Did I make it?……………..
Seems I did. And may I ask why the comments have to be at least 20 characters?
You made it! Your post got flagged by the spambot, but I’ve unflagged it, so please ignore any scary PMs you got. The spambot is particularly sensitive to new posts 
Absolutely. The minimum post length setting is a Discourse default that’s there to encourage folks who might reply to a post with a single word to instead reply with a reaction (
or 
or whatever) in order to not clutter up the discussion thread with short replies like “Nice!” or “I agree!”
Discourse has been in active development for a decade-and-change, and it has a ton of time-tested defaults like this in place to help encourage constructive internet conversations. If you want to dig in, there’s a developer forum called Discourse Meta where the developers discuss the logic behind settings like this.
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I appreciate forums like this vs something like discord. This kind of web 2.0 discussion forum is my favorite way to communicate on the internet.
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I, for one, love forums in terms of communicating with whoever on the web and am excited to participate in the community here in a deeper way. Chat rooms can be alright in a breaking news sort of moment, but it is typically more difficult to go back and find historical information/messages/media/data/etc if you need it further down the line.
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Love you guys!
Good luck with the trolls 
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Appreciate the update on tomato plants. I first tried in 2020. No good - too hot too early. Each subsequent year was the same …alas. So it is a remarkable change in the weather that someone was able to get it here in Houston 2025.
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With this “mild” summer so far, dare we begin to hope for a mid september fall front?
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Okay I made my account! Thank you, Lee!
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Let’s try a second post to see if I can break it!
Nope, apparently not
(knock on wood)
Thanks for walking us through this!
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It’s a little confusing, but I’m willing to give it all a bit of time. At least I got signed in/on.
Thanks for sticking with us It’ll get less confusing with use, I promise!
Think of it like this: There are three “places” to go, and you can get to them from the “Categories” list in the sidebar at left. If you’re on mobile, or if you don’t see anything that says “Categories” on the left side of your screen, tap the three-line “hamburger” menu at top-left:
Once you’ve tapped it, you should see the “Categories” list, which should look kind of like this:
The SCW category is where Eric or Matt’s daily SCW posts will appear, and the Eyewall category is where the daily (or weekly, or seasonal) Eyewall posts will appear. If you want to comment on the day’s Space City Weather post, you’d hit the Space City Weather category, and the top thread there ought to be latest thing published on the site.
Alternately, you can come in via the SCW or Eyewall homepage—at the bottom of every post will be a link to that post’s Discourse topic, and you can click/tap that and be taken directly there.
(And finally, the Forum Feedback category is if you have any issues or feedback about the forum itself.)
Hopefully that helps a bit—Discourse can definitely be overwhelming!
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I am in! Pretty simple to comment and interact. I like it!
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