What do you guys think about discourse?
- Thread starter =MGN=RedEagle
- Start date
RobinHood
Well-known member
How so? It's very much like a normal forum with categories and threads?
I think it's pretty good, and has a fair few decent built in features than XF lacks. I've seen some very good active forums built on it.
There's a good built in newsletter that sends out emails with recent topics, and it even includes images, providing quite an enticing email to encourage users to click through and visit.
It's got desktop browser notifications.
I like that you can include emoji just by typing shortcodes and it will auto suggest and complete them for you.
The link expansion can be quite useful.
Built in community moderation is useful.
It's got a decent chat plugin that works quite well and follows you around in the nav bar so you can access it from any page.
I never noticed the official App before, that looks good and enables push on mobile. Something we're sorely lacking on XF sites. It looks like it only works for Discourse hosted forums though.
Not cheap to go the hosted route at $1200 a year.
But they managed to get a lot of the basics for a cross platform message board working really well, and a ton of useful features out of the box, if the app is good that could end up being pretty good value.
RobinHood
Well-known member
Looks like they've got a decent selection of 1st party plugins now too that I hadn't seen before
Standard:
Advanced:
The app will by why it's taking off on on mobile communities, looks like they've added better oboarding to it in the latest release too, another good feature.
I remember when they first started out 5 years ago, it was only a small 2 man team, it seems they're growing pretty darn fast with 20 employees now.
I decided to look through Wikipedia an seems their hosting model is working pretty well for them, as of 8 months ago they were taking in $125k per month and anticipated being at $160K per month by 2018. (Interesting read with lots of real numbers about the company as they grew)
Good quote here too on how they perceive themselves growing into the WordPress of communities. Sounds like a good idea.
Some interesting info on the app here, it looks like it uses OneSignal for Push.
Honestly, after doing all this research and realising they have a mobile app I'd make them a serious contender if I was starting a new community.
Standard:
- Akismet anti-spam
- Solved — mark a reply as the solution
- Slack — real time chat notifications
- Cakeday — celebrate join date or birthday
- Google AdSense / DFP
- Patreon integration
Advanced:
- Data Explorer — run live SQL queries and ad-hoc reports
- Assignment — assign a topic to staff for handling
- Topic Voting — vote up favorite topics
- Staff Notes — annotate user accounts
- Canned Replies — automate common staff replies
- MathJax — detailed math annotations
- General oAuth 2.0 and LinkedIn login support
The app will by why it's taking off on on mobile communities, looks like they've added better oboarding to it in the latest release too, another good feature.
I remember when they first started out 5 years ago, it was only a small 2 man team, it seems they're growing pretty darn fast with 20 employees now.
I decided to look through Wikipedia an seems their hosting model is working pretty well for them, as of 8 months ago they were taking in $125k per month and anticipated being at $160K per month by 2018. (Interesting read with lots of real numbers about the company as they grew)
Good quote here too on how they perceive themselves growing into the WordPress of communities. Sounds like a good idea.
Some interesting info on the app here, it looks like it uses OneSignal for Push.
Honestly, after doing all this research and realising they have a mobile app I'd make them a serious contender if I was starting a new community.
RobinHood
Well-known member
I wonder what @digitalpoint 's commercial forum cookie tracker would look like if it included Discourse. The problem is it would have have to only track sites hosted on the Discourse servers, as they're the commercial customers.
Is that something that's possible Shawn?
Is that something that's possible Shawn?
=MGN=RedEagle
Well-known member
Wait, its open source so there are many non-customers that have sites right?
RobinHood
Well-known member
Exactly. It's free for anyone to download and install and customise locally or on their own private servers, but they've built a pretty sweet commercial business offering the hosting and maintenance etc. to individual admins, business and enterprise clients who don't want to deal with the hassle of a lot of the server side administration and upkeep. This all helps fund further development and growth.
Pretty much like Wordpress. Free and open source to download and host yourself, or you can pay to have your site hosted through WordPress.com
Pretty much like Wordpress. Free and open source to download and host yourself, or you can pay to have your site hosted through WordPress.com
Digital Doctor
Well-known member
Xenforo could learn *ALOT* from Discourse.
It does some things very well.
I officially hate Xenforo Pages now. I can see why IB is migrating away from Pages on Rennlist, etc.
It is expensive, the Discourse site I frequent is hosted and costs $750/month.
I'm really impressed with Discourse as a forum.
Most Xenforo installs are not 8wayrun.com
Discourse has wiki posts which is better than native Xenforo.
All forums are an information disaster. By design. Xenforo 2 was not a move forward taking content seriously.
It does some things very well.
I officially hate Xenforo Pages now. I can see why IB is migrating away from Pages on Rennlist, etc.
It is expensive, the Discourse site I frequent is hosted and costs $750/month.
I'm really impressed with Discourse as a forum.
and Xenforo.
Most Xenforo installs are not 8wayrun.com
Discourse has wiki posts which is better than native Xenforo.
All forums are an information disaster. By design. Xenforo 2 was not a move forward taking content seriously.
What Xenforo really needs is to combine CMS, Forum, and Wiki functionality all in one. I have a WP and XF site and am constantly stuggling with duplication of content and lack of integration between the two. There really is no reason you can't have one system that does it all -- have XF host CMS content page with XF-based comments. Granted, you can post content in the first post of a thread, but then it's "boxed" into the XF forum format versus a content-first page with no chrome (forum formatting), just content, and comments below it (again without the forum formatting). Then, that same content and comments can be displayed with forum formatting in the forum. Right now to accomplish this you need a WP-XF bridge.
digitalpoint
Well-known member
Probably technically possible, yeah. But to be honest I have too much real work to be mucking with that thing these days. Lol
Robust
Well-known member
Discourse is aimed for real-time like conversations, rather than threaded discussions. That's not necessarily bad, I've used Discourse in the past and there's some communities I think it's better supported for (company support forums might be one example of such), but information is lost much easier on Discourse when compared to XenForo. It's more conversation based than thread based. Same goes with reddit, really.
If something like Discourse is what you're looking for in a specific project, and it's more suitable for that project, then you should use the right tool for the specific job. XenForo has its own target audience, and this style of forums, whilst may seem dated, is still pretty relevant for many communities.
Robust
Well-known member
Have you looked into XenPorta or CTA: Featured Threads? They can essentially create the CMS aspect with the homepage. As for the wiki functionality, VaultWiki and XenWiki (also by Jaxel) come to mind. They're pretty solid solutions and do what you're asking for.
They might not be as "powerful" as WordPress, but they aren't WordPress replacements. I prefer the simplicity of them. I personally think WordPress is extremely bloated. I hate it.
RobinHood
Well-known member
I don't know, I don't think the idea of real time conversation and normal forum threads are mutually exclusive. Discourse does create threaded discussions like a normal forum which I wouldn't say get lost any easier than any other forum. You still have categories for nodes and active threads get bumped to the top.
There are lots of big threads on a discourse forum that I frequent which live for many days, weeks or months as they still have a topic title and a normal forum thread format which makes content easy to find, search through and come back to at a later date. I barely ever return to a reddit thread after a day or two when it falls out of peoples feed, as posting in the thread doesn't bump it to the top of the subreddit again so no one who wasn't already part of the conversation will be exposed to the new activity.
I'd say the search within a thread on discourse is superior to most other forums too. Any single post results are listed immediately below the search box and clicking each ones jumps you directly to that post with minimul full page refreshes or having to back out to search results to find and click the next entry.
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Digital Doctor
Well-known member
Neither Discourse or Xenforo are threaded.
VB3 and 2 were threaded.
Reddit is threaded.
Xenforo has non threaded “threads”.
VB3 and 2 were threaded.
Reddit is threaded.
Xenforo has non threaded “threads”.
Jaxel
Well-known member
Technicalities. XenForo functions as pointers... but its displayed as threaded.
Thats like calling Street Fighter V a 3D-fighting game because the character models are 3D... even though everything else functions as a 2D fighting game.
upnet
Active member
Interesting. Push notifications, link expansion, and emoji shortcodes made it to XF2.1. Competition is good, no?
Newsletters have several options with XF.
How does the built-in community moderation work?
$100 a month for 100k page views seems horrible for admin, but good for Discourse.
AFAIK XF still doesn’t have a good option for an app. That might be the biggest selling point for Discourse, though I haven’t tried theirs.
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