Discourse - new open source forum platform for the "next 10 years"

[Brook]

In many ways it feels like what XF should have been.

It's still very early days, beta went up yesterday - check it out www.discourse.org

I like it a lot - but some things are also quite annoying/taking some getting used to. What do you think?

 

[Digital Doctor]

I like it a lot

Seems like a slightly tweaked version of the same old threaded discussion.
Pasting images directly was slightly interesting.
What do you like ?

I'll look again. But I'm not seeing anything worth getting excited over.

 

[Brook]

Lots of things..

Live replies
Quoting system
Replying to a thread while browsing any page on the site (great if you need to look up a different thread for something to refer to)
Some top devs working on it (two from the original Stack overflow team)
Lots of (higher end) developer interest already

But I guess most of all that it's a fresh approach to forums - not held back by the paradigm of the 'old' way.

 

[petertdavis]

Seems like a lot of hype to me. The only one thing I saw there that I haven't seen before is the reply as a new topic, and that's something that wouldn't be too hard to build into existing forum software.

 

[Adam H]

I like it, might give it a spin if i can think of something to use it for.........

 

[Digital Doctor]

Might be nice if it could deeply integrate with Wordpress

Seems like a lot of hype to me. The only one thing I saw there that I haven't seen before is the reply as a new topic, and that's something that wouldn't be too hard to build into existing forum software.

I do that already in Xenforo

DEMO.

 

[Biker-AdEx]

I like what's built into it, but have to wonder how well it will scale with a fairly large community.

Needs a bit more polish before I'd consider it. It looks, well, open source!

 

[Mikey]

It feels like they have done this for the hell of doing it. Answering a question that wasn't asked.

Does it bring many new ideas to the general forum paradigm? No. Their welcome message boils down to "hey, you can post, we don't have pages, and we have a reputation system". People will go 'ooh shiney' at the Ajax but once it's worn off you have a very stripped down forum.

I'm not a fan. /2¢

 

[/dev/urandon]

I had a long look at it and read some articles and I gotta agree it seems like mostly hype at this point. They might have some well known guys working on it but they haven't shown me anything that makes me want to jump ship.

If they are still around in two years they might have something worth using. Until then I'm going to sit and wait.

 

[meetdilip]

Myself too, not impressed. Also it is Ruby, the support guys I have are all php.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Lots of things..
Live replies

FYI: Xenforo has a live replies addon (by sonnb so it should be good).

So all this has delayed the custom site I had planned to replace my forum - it's still on the cards, but the forum now obviously needs updating so the choice really boiled down to XF and Discourse.

DIscourse is the Ruby/Ember(JS) forum app. I like it, but, being a new product they just don't have the years of experience that KAM have when it comes to forum software. It's not just about the end user, it's about the needs of Administrators too - and I think it will take a while for Discourse to get that essential piece of the puzzle right. Of course they have other positives, mainly, huge support from some very good professional developers. It's going to be a very different type of forum - and right now, I don't think it is suitable for my established communities. New forums, I will definitely be trying it for a few new forums I have in mind, though.

http://try.discourse.org/