# Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

**URL:** <https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/21>\
**Category:** blog\
**Created:** [February 5, 2013, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/21 "2013-02-05T00:00:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 80

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/user_avatar/discourse.codinghorror.com/codinghorror/32/36371_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2013, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/21/80 "2013-02-09T00:00:00Z")

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> What does it mean for search engines that the client is entirely JavaScript

See for yourself; search for [http://meta.discourse.org](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](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](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/](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.

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