- Joined
- Apr 7, 2020
- Messages
- 17
I run a big board (1.3M posts) that has slowed down a lot over the years. I've blamed everything from Facebook groups to my own lack of time to run the site (I know the latter is more likely, haha). Anyway, we are on XenForo 2.1, which I love and see used by many big boards. However, I managed to set up a development site for Discourse recently to test it out and so far in this non-production environment, it seems like a dream come true.
Now, a little about my background. I was with vBulletin from 2001 through 2015. I'm pretty sure I was on vB 2.x all the way to 4.x, but I don't remember for sure where they were in 2001. In 2015, like many vBulletin users not happy with the direction of the company, I switched to XenForo and have been with them for the last 5 years.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think XenForo is excellent software. It captures the experience of vBulletin's better days and expands upon it. The Admin Zone itself uses it, so I'm sure many here feel this way as well. What I don't like about XenForo is the lack of a development community. For business and tech boards, XenForo makes a ton of sense, but I won't lie, I've looked the other way a few times since looking more into Discourse.
I used to program my own plugins for vBulletin and had built up quite the roster of gamification plugins to spur engagement in my communities. XenForo was so different when it came to coding that I never really rebuilt any of my custom plugins after making the switch. I became much more of a marketer than a developer during the past 10 years and don't really see myself going back to the level of development I was doing back then.
So I'm looking at Discourse for a few reasons.
A) Some of the biggest gaming company boards use it and from browsing those sites, it seems to work very well for their purposes. Granted, one of the biggest gaming sites in the world uses XenForo (Not sure if I can post links here, so I won't).
B) The mobile version of Discourse is second to none and the app is a huge benefit for those wanting to avoid Tapatalk.
C) The gamification features built into Discourse are very much on par with stuff my members loved in the past. Trophies in XenForo are very basic and don't get the job done IMHO.
D) There is a strong developer community and it's all easy to work with through GitHub.
E) They have native integration with Zapier (albeit limited Zaps at this point) and Wordpress, two things I feel many other forum platforms are way behind on.
And yes, there are downsides. As a traditional forum user, I don't love the default styles, but with a little tweaking, I'm not going to let that be the biggest of my concerns. I also think Discourse brings some unique features to the table that aren't yet being utilized by other boards. It's easily the most user friendly to the social media generation that doesn't know what to do with classic forum tables. As for being written in Ruby on Rails vs PHP? I can live with that. I do love PHP/MySQL though.
So, all that said, I'm genuinely curious, has anyone here switched to Discourse? If so, did your users like the move or did you get pushback?
And most importantly, did YOU as an admin end up liking the move or do you regret it?
The grass is always greener, right?
Now, a little about my background. I was with vBulletin from 2001 through 2015. I'm pretty sure I was on vB 2.x all the way to 4.x, but I don't remember for sure where they were in 2001. In 2015, like many vBulletin users not happy with the direction of the company, I switched to XenForo and have been with them for the last 5 years.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think XenForo is excellent software. It captures the experience of vBulletin's better days and expands upon it. The Admin Zone itself uses it, so I'm sure many here feel this way as well. What I don't like about XenForo is the lack of a development community. For business and tech boards, XenForo makes a ton of sense, but I won't lie, I've looked the other way a few times since looking more into Discourse.
I used to program my own plugins for vBulletin and had built up quite the roster of gamification plugins to spur engagement in my communities. XenForo was so different when it came to coding that I never really rebuilt any of my custom plugins after making the switch. I became much more of a marketer than a developer during the past 10 years and don't really see myself going back to the level of development I was doing back then.
So I'm looking at Discourse for a few reasons.
A) Some of the biggest gaming company boards use it and from browsing those sites, it seems to work very well for their purposes. Granted, one of the biggest gaming sites in the world uses XenForo (Not sure if I can post links here, so I won't).
B) The mobile version of Discourse is second to none and the app is a huge benefit for those wanting to avoid Tapatalk.
C) The gamification features built into Discourse are very much on par with stuff my members loved in the past. Trophies in XenForo are very basic and don't get the job done IMHO.
D) There is a strong developer community and it's all easy to work with through GitHub.
E) They have native integration with Zapier (albeit limited Zaps at this point) and Wordpress, two things I feel many other forum platforms are way behind on.
And yes, there are downsides. As a traditional forum user, I don't love the default styles, but with a little tweaking, I'm not going to let that be the biggest of my concerns. I also think Discourse brings some unique features to the table that aren't yet being utilized by other boards. It's easily the most user friendly to the social media generation that doesn't know what to do with classic forum tables. As for being written in Ruby on Rails vs PHP? I can live with that. I do love PHP/MySQL though.
So, all that said, I'm genuinely curious, has anyone here switched to Discourse? If so, did your users like the move or did you get pushback?
And most importantly, did YOU as an admin end up liking the move or do you regret it?
The grass is always greener, right?