Oh My God! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
In addition to the login methods you already support, I would strongly recommend that you add support for Steam (via OpenId) Authentication.
Doing so will instantly make you very popular with a large number of gaming clans/guilds/groups who usually resort to using phpbb/vbulletin.
Wow. We’re truly in the midst of dot-com bubble 2.0. Where do I go to get my idiotic ideas funded by VCs?
How is this a steaming pile of crap? Let me count the ways.
- No accessibility.
- Insane browser requirements ruling out half the potential users.
- People like forums because of the community, not the software.
- People are perfectly happy with vBulletin/phpBB/4Chan/reddit/slashdot. Especially phpBB, hence its ubiquity.
- People like threading, despite your quixotic, uninformed rant against it several posts ago.
You haven’t created something new like StackOverflow here, Jeff. You’ve just reinvented a perfectly good wheel, badly. What a waste.
You know what would be really useful? You know what we really lost in the transition from Usenet to message boards? Automatic archiving, and a centralized directory of forums. That I’ll pay for. Wonder if I can get VC money for that? Nah, too hard to explain in 140 characters.
Is there any possibility of this being rolled out on the Stack Exchange network for Meta discussion? It seems that this would be a more natural model for the kinds of discussions that go on there.
@Jonathan Coleman :: You said, “Discourse is ‘comment’ software… not forum software”. Is it? PaidContent (GigaOm) http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/06/fixing-online-comments-how-do-you-automate-trust/ thinks so. Yet Jeff refers to it as a forum platform. No, that’s not entirely true. He also refers to Discourse as a discussion platform. Is it intended for both?
@lacunae :: I would like VC funding for some of my ideas too. You should try asking, you might be surprised. Then you can tell us about it, and maybe I’ll be brave enough to follow in your footsteps. Also: I just read the first Discourse blog post. One item in your wish list (last paragraph) is possible with Discourse, specifically, a centralized directory of forums.
@Jeff :: OpenID is worth considering, no? I’d suggest the same with threading. Everyone likes threading. Continuous scrolling will be balky at first. I don’t like it, but given time, I’m certain you can make it work.
Congratulations on your new endeavor!
What does it mean for search engines that the client is entirely JavaScript
See for yourself; search for http://meta.discourse.org content
What effect do you think the relative scarcity of affordable Ruby/Postgres hosting will do to the adoption rate of Discourse?
Vice-versa, we want the killer app to drive better adoption of Ruby hosting.
What it actually means is that you are keeping an exit door if you ever want to close the source again in the future: contributors agree to license you their copyright for whatever future happens.
The CLA is there because we reserve the right to re-license the Discourse code when selling it to enterprises.
I hope, there’ll be an easy way to migrate data from old forum software to be used with this new engine.
Realistically we don’t expect many migrations of large communities, because the social and technical friction is too high, see http://www.discourse.org/faq/#switch But that said, we do have a solid export and import format, so anyone can write a converter to Discourse import format.
Reddit does a great job at promoting discussion with their design.
I disagree, I think Reddit is great for link and meme fun, but terrible for actual discussion.
To me, that means you need a nested / threaded system
See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html
I’m curious to know why you decided to use Ruby on Rails for Discourse.
Open source projects have to use languages and toolchains that are free to everyone, to reduce any friction in participation. It was either Ruby or Python, and Robin knew Ruby, so… http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/
No OpenID login option
It’s just hard unless the OpenID provider validates the email. Email = identity. People conveniently forget that Stack Overflow, unlike virtually every other website on the internet, did not want your email at all, and would not use it even if it had it.
When will codinghorror comments be powered by Discourse?
It’s on the roadmap! Probably 12 months out though.
with SO, you deconstructed the online forum/BBS, and now you are setting out to reconstruct them
Not at all – Q&A is a small subset of what communities do. Not all communities can work in a fact and science based Q&A format, but that’s what the SE engine is by far best at.
Great software! Are you thinking about supporting WebID-Login and exposing Linked Data?
Jeff, the work you’ve done with StackOverflow is amazing. That’s why I’m a little surprised at this latest effort. It’s quite … underwhelming.
The three biggest problems with forums:
- Information overload.
- Ugly.
- Difficult to find what you’re looking for.
As far as I can tell Discourse has done nothing to address any of these problems.
Pinterest has been such a success because it solved all three of these issues for images. If Discourse is going to as revolutionary as you talk, then it will also have to address these issues. Right now, I see it as pretty much the same as everything else and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
I’m sure you will write about Discourse more. I’ll revisit the site next time you do.
with SO, you deconstructed the online forum/BBS, and now you are setting out to reconstruct them
Not at all – Q&A is a small subset of what communities do. Not all communities can work in a fact and science based Q&A format, but that’s what the SE engine is by far best at.
Now watch as I rant for dozens of lines justifying why my analogy was appropriate:
(just kidding, it’s not worth getting upset over 
Hi Jeff
There’re at least one additional initiative to building new forum software.
I’m developing this: http://www.debiki.com/for/forums
Interestingly enough, Discourse and Debiki have chosen fairly different
things to improve 
I listed Discourse on this page with links to “forum software for the
future”: http://www.debiki.com/forum/-61859-forum-software-for-the-future
(My first comment on your blog.)
Best regards,
KajMagnus
The eternal truth about forums; vanilla is not an option. Hence 1000+1 flavors and nobody got it right, and won’t.
I’m quoting you from http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html last May:
“One of the explicit goals of my next project is to do whatever we can to buff up a … particular … open source language ecosystem such that it can truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment.”
Really, with postgres and Rails? Rails is a bitch in itself, but finding postgres competence? Close to impossible, compared to MySQL.
Don’t get me wrong, the forum looks awesome, and I was dying to try it out. But then I realized I couldn’t host it. My employee couldn’t host it. Heck, nobody I KNOW could host it.
@Håvard what’s the solution write the site in .net with mssql, php with mysql, vb with a file system?
I read this and was looking forward to seeing how you could improve on forums. It might not be so bad after awhile, but my first impression wasn’t very good.
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Looks and feels more like an overcomplicated twitter feed, facebook wall, or (best case scenario) comment thread rather than a forum.
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The theme detracts from the discussion and draws away from the content.
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Endless scrolling is today’s version of the marquee tag and the blink tag. May as well have an animated construction worker gif and some midi music that blasts at full volume when you open the page with no controls to turn it off.
Front-end stuff aside, it’s not all bad. There’s a lot there even if it’s not apparent or comprehensible. Curious what the back end and API are like. Not enough to set up another stack just to try it out, though.
You should speak with Lonely Planet
http://www.tnooz.com/2013/02/13/news/bbc-defends-suspension-of-lonely-planet-thorn-tree-as-details-emerge-over-original-complaint/
I like it. My first question was how threads of replies are handled, and I like the model Discourse has chosen: all replies (and replies to replies) are listed top to bottom, and are expandable from the target (or source?) of the reply.
My only critique at this time is the abundant white space. A more compact layout may improve browsing/scrolling through the topic.
I’m excited to poke around with this this weekend. I was just thinking the other day that forums software hasn’t improved much in the last decade, and StackOverflow is so conscientiously designed that I can’t wait to see your take on discussions.
Obviously I’m not old enough to share the nostalgia others seem to have for newsgroups and phpBB. I agree with Jeff: forum software has been pretty horribly stagnant over the last decade. Very few forums take advantage of even the most basic Ajax features these days.
After discovering stackoverflow, I was pretty amazed with it and wondered what a SO-like forum would be. Now I know, and I actually like it a lot. It solves a number of things that I think are wrong with most current forums: it has a powerful system of threading, ways to see the participants, a good text editor, and a modern design.
One thing I’d like to see is a bit of integration with the SO q&a system. A discussion forum will be used from time to time (or very often) for questions that don’t need a discussion, so I think it would be good to provide that rather than to direct people off-site for answers.
I think infinite pagination is not to everyone’s tastes. Similarly, the threading system, I like but others seem not to. Are you planning on having these as options?
@ whoever complained about browser requirements: get over it. Its 2013, not 1993: browsers are free, and update regularly and automatically. There isn’t really any excuse for not having an up-to-date browser with javascript enabled.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned XenForo. It makes vBulletin, phpBB, et all look like they were made 50 years ago.
Also Jeff, in the article you showed a screenshot of a forum in 2013 claiming it hasnt changed.
The screenshot you provided for 2013 shows the forum running software that was discontinued 3 years ago…hardly a fair argument. It would have been more fair to compare it against something like a vB 4.x or XenForo forum, and not skew results in favor of your new venture.