Discourse & nodebb

[aker]

Well, looking for new alternatives to "modernize" my forum, i've found this two FREE alternatives,
the trade off is that they are not orientated to small-mid size communities.

Both are feature rich, fast, and have lot cool features for the end user (the poster), both created to be mobile friendly, with the goal to close the gap between the average social media user (facebook) and forums.

1. Discourse (Needs Rails, requires a powerful VPS to run). http://www.discourse.org/
Their have a moderation approach different than the traditional forums. It uses a system to create trust between users, the more the users participate in the community the more valuable the users becomes in terms of moderation. It is called to be the FORUM platform for the next generation.

2. NodeBB (Uses Node.js) https://nodebb.org/ FAST as F.

Anybody has checked them? Tried or use them?

First Post. YAY.

 

[Sim]

2. NodeBB (Uses Node.js) https://nodebb.org/ FAST as F.

I played around with NodeBB a little bit. Come to find out, one of the coders for NodeBB use to be apart of the same coding community that ended in 2008. I remembered his handle when I joined Node. It was a nice to catch up. =]

 

[AWS]

I have a test site running Discourse. I too see it as the future. The test site is at http://windowsbb.com.

I never checked out NodeBB. Might have to take a look at it.

 

[tomk]

I never checked out NodeBB. Might have to take a look at it.

The new NodeBB Theme makes it look so much like Discourse, talk about unoriginality.

 

[julianlam]

@tomkThe main thing to note is that theming NodeBB is a very free-form experience, we don't limit you in any way, and our theming engine really allows you to express yourself through both template and stylesheet changes.

e.g. http://galaxygraph.fr or http://concourse.expii.com/

 

[s.molinari]

No matter what forum system you decide to use, the issue remains the same. It is only one system. If all you want is a forum on your site. Great. Any of these systems will help you make a forum. If you want to do more with your site, then you get into the real troubles, especially if you have to use different technologies to make the different systems run, like PHP with Node or Ruby.

Also, just a word about Discourse and it being "the future". I think one of the biggest sites now using Discourse is Sitepoint.com. They just did an upgrade about a week ago and it broke replying. It works, but you get an annoying error after about 30 seconds later (ajax timeout?) and if you quickly switch between posts before the error comes up and reply quickly, it asks you if you really want to post in that thread, because your last post is still in the editor. Discourse "thinks" you didn't make the previous post. A real usability PITA and not something that should happen to a professional site like Sitepoint.

One could say, it was a mistake of Sitepoint's, because they obviously didn't test the software update at all. But, I don't believe in pushing such issues onto the end user. However, being it is OSS, that is what happens. So, just a word of the wise about using OSS. More responsibility is put on you as the user of the software and that is the cost of it being "free", which can be really costly too. Be aware of that.

Scott