How Do You Feel About Discourse?

[Digital Doctor]

And while I like the idea of endless scrolling, but in practice with Discourse it makes me feel disoriented.

I think I like it.
Can't make up my mind.

 

[\o/]

Since I have the dubious pleasure of being registered in a couple of communities which have switched to Discourse for no good reason except assumed fanciness, I take this topic as a chance to (virtually) scream out my thoughts:

• Discourse assumes JavaScript to be enabled.
  This means that Discourse admins expect you to allow them to run code on your computer. While one could argue that "nobody cares anyway", there are special cases where even this is wrong:
  Imagine a support forum for a popular server operating system. If your server suddenly breaks, you probably won't have a shiny GUI browser available - only command-line browsers without support for JavaScript. Good luck.
  In theory, Discourse says "JavaScript is recommended" in its footer. In practice, there is no "Register" button without JavaScript.
• There are no discussions in Discourse.
  You can reply to postings, you can even quote them - but your reply is sent to the end of a thread. Enjoy following a thread with several hundred replies where everyone seems to be talking to everyone else while referencing postings which you don't see because they were 52 pages prior to where you are.
• Discourse's UI designer should be fired.
  This is likely to be a matter of taste, but I find the UI on anything but very small screens (e.g. smartphones) atrocious. What's with all that whitespace?

TL;DR: I feel sad about Discourse.

 

[PetersWeb]

I recently moved my large community (over 500K posts) from XF to Discourse. It's been up and running for around 6 months now and while I like the look of it, I have become uncomfortable with a few things:

• Needing to host with a specific host (Digital Ocean in this case) to utilise Docker
• My reliance on paid assistance for migration - I have moved from VB to XF and was able to do this myself which is my preference
• Installation of plugins needing to be done through the command line

I know that these are all things that I should have sorted out prior to moving to Discourse. I admit that I was too quick to move away from XF and didn't do my due diligence.

I would recommend that anyone thinking of moving to Discourse make sure that they are comfortable with my points above before moving.