[SUGGESTION] Discourse Forum

Hello everyone,


I have recently created an account in this forum, after playing for more than a year.
Many other communities I take part in use other forum software, which I think works better. My favorite one is Discourse. I just want you to take a look at it, say what you think about it and think about the possibility to migrate to Discourse.

Pros:
- FLOSS (GPLv2)
- Modern design
- Community self-regulation approach -> you can get to some higher ranks like leader by being active a lot.
- Very convenient (try it yourself on the demo site)
- Loads more content when scrolling down
- Only one long thread, no pages, just post numbers
- E-Mail compatible

Cons:
- Requires "beefy" server hardware
- Performance and security might not be the best
- Migration might be difficult

A great example for a active community using Discourse is Freifunk, a German initiative for free Wifi: https://forum.freifunk.net/
Another community: https://community.letsencrypt.org/

I'm also interested to help with administration.


Greetings from Germany

PetaByteBoy

Just want to chime in to say that Discourse is brilliant, it's also very customizable if you put the effort into it.

Sorry but that I looked at discourse and its hideous. A forum should not look like nasty social media sites that are designed for 15 seconds of info consumption.

The best layout for a forum is still the table showing the post title and linking to a classic flat view.

I agree with end user here.

Unless someone can show an example of Discourse looking like a 'classic' forum, my vote remains on sticking with what we have.

Note that the "modern design" only works if JavaScript is enabled.

Note that the "modern design" only works if JavaScript is enabled.

I agree it would be nice if it worked without JS. But the scripts are all served from the Forum's webserver and the unobfuscated source is available and you can even read properly in elinks.

pros:
* satisfy web 2.0 fetishes

cons:
* busy design
* worse performance
* categories and structure is essentially transparent, difficult to navigate
* community self-regulation approach (this CAN be a pro but in many cases doesn't work)
* non-standard

http://flarum.org/
seems also cool, and a bit more lightweight.

http://flarum.org/
seems also cool, and a bit more lightweight.

Not as bad as discourse but trying to make it look like some mobile social media thing just kills the design. There is nothing wrong with a typical forum layout, its like that for a reason as it works and anything else that's been tried just makes a mess out of it.

Forums designs should be simple as the site is for long term data retention and community activity. They're not mean for social circle building (well up to a certain point) Forums are about interest and long term discussions about them.

Flarum looks nice but discourse is just hideous.