Why do people use discourse?

[rafalp]

There is a case where switching is better. Examples: IPB 3 to XF (Since IPB 4 to some people stinks) and there is VB 4 to XF because VB 5 was useless on release. Other than that I agree with you.

Speak of the devil.

 

[Danielx64]

Speak of the devil.

What do you mean? There is always the edge case where switching is better.

 

[rafalp]

Read more of the discussion for context

 

[Dan18]

What do you mean? There is always the edge case where switching is better.

He mean switch to Misago is the best .

 

[Timelord_]

It seems like discourse is fairly popular. My question s, why do people use it? I would test it out if I could, but it requires a server or VPS with 1gb of ram. It needs a lot of ram. Why does it need so much ram? Why do people use it if it is so resource heavy?

The price is right for the software! $0.00

 

[NotRupert]

There is a case where switching is better. Examples: IPB 3 to XF (Since IPB 4 to some people stinks) and there is VB 4 to XF because VB 5 was useless on release. Other than that I agree with you.

This. VB5 actually made a couple of dozen members leave a forum I frequent, because it sucks so bad I don't even know any fitting expletives. Our community is active *despite* VB5, which speaks volumes about the engagement of members. There are daily complaints about the software, but pragmatic reasons have pushed the planned migration to another platform further into the future for years.

 

[overcast]

I personally don't like the discourse the reason being lot of content at the bottom gets stuck with the parallax loading. And it's one of the worst features of the discourse. Adding important pages at the bottom and then using parallax loading is not worth it. I prefer flarum instead, which is lot easier to use.

 

[Mark Wilkin]

It seems like discourse is fairly popular. My question s, why do people use it? I would test it out if I could, but it requires a server or VPS with 1gb of ram. It needs a lot of ram. Why does it need so much ram? Why do people use it if it is so resource heavy?

I use it because I like it. It's clean and simple to use as a member and as an admin it has a host of features I find useful, like their automated spam blocking and their recently redesigned moderation queue. Their metrics dashboard is also the best one I've seen for forum admin (of Vbulletin, Xenforo and Lithium). Also I found setup to be remarkably easy on a digitalocean, which was reasonably cheap hosting wise as well.

It's designed for mobiles so it's very easy to use, even for admin tasks, on them compared to the other forum I manage on Xenforo. And considering 45% of my forum traffic is on mobile this is important. Also since Google put in a bunch of work on their javascript engine Android performance is up to where iPhone performance is (state of play as of June 2018).

I also like the fact that it's still being actively developed with regular updates, yes Jeff very much has his own oppinions about what a forum should do but generally him and the team have steered things in a direction I approve of. Just for example the recent release has a thing where it tells mods and trusted users if someone hasn't posted in a while and comes back to post so you can make sure to try and keep them engaged. It's a small thing, but there's a lot of useful tweaks like that they've added over the years.

 

[LeadCrow]

It's gaining popularity as nowadays classic php-tuned hosting is no longer an ideal server environment, wether it is at the budget level or highend. New age scripts got rid of a lot of issues the php scripts us dinosaurs still have to contend with. Discourse might feel ugly as hell but the technicals are sound, and user-facing interface easy to modify.

No numbers here, but I suspect a large part of discourse's audience actually went to nodebb as an alternative much easier to setup and manage. Consider the average age of forumgoers - have they surfed on desktops during php scripts' golden age, or was a simple mobile experience the dominant one they experienced?

 

[MagicalAzareal]

People like it because it's modern.

Live topic list, live topics, live notifications, etc. It's had those for about six years while the "major software" sat around doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs and pushing out relatively trivial features.
These days, they're largely copying Discourse, but have nowhere near as much useful functionality and everything is ten times as clunky (e.g. XF2's "post from homepage").

I think Discourse is overrated though, there are much better options, maybe NodeBB.
It supports both infinite scrolling or pagination, if you find the other option uncomfortable.

 

[CarpCharacin]

(e.g. XF2's "post from homepage")

What's wrong with the functionality implemented in XF2?

 

[MagicalAzareal]

What's wrong with the functionality implemented in XF2?

I haven't tried it in a while (a couple of years or so), but I personally found it very clunky.

You go to the forum list, you hit the button to make a post, and then, you get a little modal with all the forum descriptions, counts, etc. when they could have just had a simple drop-down with all the forums next to the topic title field like in the new age software.

It's not something they can't fix, but for a feature which exists for the sole purpose of making things quicker and easier, it feels strange to have so much boilerplate in between you and you creating the topic you want.

 

[rafalp]

There's always a trade-off involved. One of top criticisms of Discourse is how it supports only two levels of depth in category tree, but they need to do it to keep a lot of their UI simple. Imagine posting thread on TAZ and picking right category from select input. There's bazillion of them.

 

[haqzore]

There's always a trade-off involved. One of top criticisms of Discourse is how it supports only two levels of depth in category tree, but they need to do it to keep a lot of their UI simple. Imagine posting thread on TAZ and picking right category from select input. There's bazillion of them.

Eh... TAZ would benefit from consolidation. A sub-forum dedicated to YaBB? Really?

Less forums with better prefix integration, for example.

 

[overcast]

I think for those who are into the server side management tend to prefer the discourse and other javascript and python based forum scripts. For those who are on limited budget and can't afford VPS, i don't think they would go for the discourse as of now.

 

[MagicalAzareal]

I think for those who are into the server side management tend to prefer the discourse and other javascript and python based forum scripts. For those who are on limited budget and can't afford VPS, i don't think they would go for the discourse as of now.

VPS is like $3/month for like 2GB of RAM, varies depending on the host.
Some hosts are higher quality than others.

Managed VPS' on the other-hand cost stupid amounts of money.

 

[overcast]

3$ a month VPS with knowledge of server side handling, how many people who own shared hosting have it?

 

[Dopply]

I don't like Discourse. Call me old fashioned, but the infinite scroll style just doesn't jive with me. Not to mention most styles don't look very good.

 

[Kyrie]

3$ a month VPS with knowledge of server side handling, how many people who own shared hosting have it?

You don't need to know for discourse, their guide for install is stupid easy.

 

[eva2000]

I don't like Discourse. Call me old fashioned, but the infinite scroll style just doesn't jive with me. Not to mention most styles don't look very good.

+1 not a fan of infinite scroll and using Discourse as an end user it seems harder to find older discussion threads - especially for threads you weren't part of the original conversation.

But getting used to using it as an end user as some forums I frequent use discourse i.e. Letsencrypt, haproxy, Cloudflare support forums https://community.cloudflare.com/