Sage Knight
Well-known member
I like it, I am sure certain niches will find it perfect.
Discourse
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p4guru
Well-known member
yeah that's my first thought as well
Jason
Well-known member
That was my point.
Your view is that Discourse doesn't build "community structure", but what about traditional forums does? I have yet to run into many people who love the current state of forum software (outside of those who run their forums). I'm sure such people exist, but I'd wager they're in the minority and people put up with whatever software is being used due to the sense of community shared (which is largely irrelevant to the software) and the fact there's not many alternatives (especially for more niche topics).
Feel free to pop onto my board and ask them. Or I can forward you the answers they provided me.
They love XenForo because:
Its quick, fast loading, even on older browsers.
Information is clearly laid out and easily found.
It is engaging, and employs features of popular social networking sites
It allowes a multitude of communication paths between members.
Now when I look at discourse.
It doesnt even load in IE8. The most popular version of IE.
Information is just bluntly placed and hardly elegant, in some places down right difficult to find or work out. Looking at a forum list, after you've scrolled down for 3 pages of topics, what do all those numbers mean without scrolling back to the top? When going down each messages theres 6 different things for each, if I want to find out about the user, I have to click his name and go to his page which is again layed out in a completely unintuative way.
They have the likes, not sure about @ tagging (granted neither does xenforo unless you use an addon).
The communication channels feel bloated and awkward, how do I send a PM to someone from a thread without having to navigate away from the page first? Infinate scrolling, gets real old real fast. How do you handle a thread with 1000+ replies? Or even 100 for that matter.
I'm sticking with my statement. This is comment software, and not community software.
Razasharp
Well-known member
I'm with Jason here - I like it! 
I have it installed on my local dev machine, but haven't had much time to play with the back end yet - but I have spent a bit of time at meta.discourse.
It's very 'sticky' - if you're interested in the topic of a discourse site, I can see users loving it - and I especially like how they have totally done their own thing and gone with a fresh take on forums. It's what forums needed.
I think it's going to be big - remember that two of the original SO team are behind it and they have already secured VC and lots of pretty good devs are already taking an interest in it.
The only thing I am not sure about is that it's an EmberJS app, and I personally have no experience of that.
Edit: the other thing that worries me is moderation!! Discourse encourages participation like no other forum I have used... so expect some very busy forums!
I have it installed on my local dev machine, but haven't had much time to play with the back end yet - but I have spent a bit of time at meta.discourse.
It's very 'sticky' - if you're interested in the topic of a discourse site, I can see users loving it - and I especially like how they have totally done their own thing and gone with a fresh take on forums. It's what forums needed.
I think it's going to be big - remember that two of the original SO team are behind it and they have already secured VC and lots of pretty good devs are already taking an interest in it.
The only thing I am not sure about is that it's an EmberJS app, and I personally have no experience of that.
Edit: the other thing that worries me is moderation!! Discourse encourages participation like no other forum I have used... so expect some very busy forums!
D.O.A.
Well-known member
a very generic looking clone of http://stackoverflow.com/ with like buttons and some more javascript. Very innovative! *cough*bullsh1t*cough*. I think a chan imageboard script presents better than this, but each to their own. I wouldnt put this in the same category as XF, VB & IPB etc anyways. The styling is irrelevant for me, it's more of the same minimalism crap designers seem to have latched onto these days. what is it now, web 3.0? Should of tried that when we all had dial-up modems 10 years ago, for me on 100mbps home connection sites like this are just pretentious and rely on javascript tricks to entice, that's not innovation at all.
The worlds internet grows faster (I admit for those "lucky" enough) yet we're still worried about downloading 46k worth of extra etag. Who gives a ****, I'm over it. If you can't spare 2 seconds at most waiting, then go outside and play on a highway.
The worlds internet grows faster (I admit for those "lucky" enough) yet we're still worried about downloading 46k worth of extra etag. Who gives a ****, I'm over it. If you can't spare 2 seconds at most waiting, then go outside and play on a highway.
It is more than time for a modern forum software. There is simple none currently. Otherwise Facebook will win by a wide margin. 
Self-reloading discussions, mobile access, easy media upload and sharing, group-building tools, perfect privacy settings, easy finding of interesting discussions ("You may also be interested in...") etc.
There is exactly NO software that provides a modern way of forum discussions. All work the way the old "Bulletin Boards" worked. Today it is just easier for people to create a Facebook group for discussions. And they have more fun discussing and sharing their media there.
The guys behind Discourse at least think about the necessary change. And I like the way they think. Let us wait for the final product.
Self-reloading discussions, mobile access, easy media upload and sharing, group-building tools, perfect privacy settings, easy finding of interesting discussions ("You may also be interested in...") etc.
There is exactly NO software that provides a modern way of forum discussions. All work the way the old "Bulletin Boards" worked. Today it is just easier for people to create a Facebook group for discussions. And they have more fun discussing and sharing their media there.
The guys behind Discourse at least think about the necessary change. And I like the way they think. Let us wait for the final product.
Luke F
Well-known member
Big +1 to this (even in 2013, still can't beat an imageboard), but disagree with the minimalism. The design isn't very good in my opinion, but it's not because of that
erich37
Well-known member
The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from First Round, Greylock, and SV Angel.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/
Looking at the Blog of the Discourse-founder, he obviously never heard of a thing called XenForo:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/
Looking at the Blog of the Discourse-founder, he obviously never heard of a thing called XenForo:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
p4guru
Well-known member
same here i like it as well - probably needs more work first if you read discourse forums alot still needs to be done first
Jason
Well-known member
Semantics, really. Forum software is glorified comment software.
I'll just agree to disagree.
Jason
Well-known member
Not many people have, in my experience, so that's not all that surprising. It took a lot of prodding to get the right people to give XenForo a serious look when I still worked at Sony Online (and they've started shying away from traditional forums for new projects due to the very points Jeff makes -- turning largely to Facebook pages). His points are still mostly relevant, whether XenForo (which is a step up from other solutions out there) was included in the discussion, or not. The state of forum software hasn't changed much in the last decade.
Semantics?
A site which works for the large majority of its users doesn't seem like semantics.
Information laid out in a way thats great for your users to find and read doesn't seem like semantics.
The ability to handle large to massive threads in some organised way doesn't seem like semantics.
Then again, I guess if a site is a hobby site and not a commerical one, such "semantics" probably don't matter. I've yet to find anyone running a large commerical forum who thinks discourse is anything but website suicide if they were to switch.
But seems your sold on it, let me know how your community does on it in 6 months time
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