I’ve been waiting for a long time for an advance in forum collaboration software. If you have done with this as you did to Q&A with the stackexchange platform, this is worth getting exicted about.
Shacknews chatty is the best forum layout.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty
After using it, all others feel inferior.
@Ckincincy You should check out Project Beehive (http://www.beehiveforum.net/) an open source project that’s been running for years and was started shortly after the old Delphi forums went purely commercial. You may find it familiar.
(I’ll still be checking Discourse out, of course.)
Heartily second the recommendation of Shacknews chatty. I used to post frequently at the Shack, and was even a moderator at one point. It is far and away the best internet commenting/discussion system I have ever used, and proof that threaded > flat.
Very sad to see Discourse perpetuating the fundamentally broken flat discussion model.
Wow, this came out of nowhere. Cant wait to see how people take to it.
I second Brad Westness’ question about how this integrates with search engines.
Wow. I was so excited as I read, what you were doing sounds so great, I could already see using it at NE1UP.com.
Then I read the comments. Ruby?
Sigh.
looks like a less intuitive, slower version of google wave. How is this supposed to overtake forums with an unindexable front end and awkvard ui? Endless scrolling is totally inappropriate in the context. Honestly, you would’ve done better investing all that time to the now open sourced Wave
I originally started my Forj forum project ( http://forj.heroku.com/ ) after getting really fed up with how terrible forum software is, but I’ve not had the time/motivation to keep working on it lately, so I’m glad Discourse is there to hopefully give the likes of phpBB a kick into the 21st century.
Users don’t go to forums because they look pretty. They go there and stay because there is action, people willing to answer your questions. (many must be unemployed cause they are online all day).
A lot of forums look like shit but they are focused on content.
Fantastic article. Very good points and awesome logo.
Look forward to seeing what you do and inspiring similar visions with our team for open discussions at http://www.studyhall.com
Best,
StudyHall Team!
thanks jef!!! exactly what alot of open source projects need
we’ve just moved a large forum over to google plus communities and its working pretty well
just 1 thing - please provide free hosting - say via your sub-domain ie. myforum.discourse.org - just like wordpress does at wordpress.com !!
Cheers
Justin
Jeff, I’ve been waiting to see what you had up your metaphorical sleeve and I can’t tell you how excited I am to see this. Really excited to try it out.
That’s really interesting! We’ve actually been working on a similar project (also open source) called Telescope:
It’s closer to Reddit or Hacker News, but I think we have very similar goals. So I would be very interested in knowing what you think.
I’m off to try Discourse to give you more feedback and steal some ideas 
Will it have an IMAP and NNTP interface, for those of use who prefer local clients?
Will it have true threaded discussions?
I swear, we are slowly reinventing USENET, poorly.
I read the logo as “iscourse”, which I guess it’s a neat name.
I hope, there’ll be an easy way to migrate data from old forum software to be used with this new engine.
I had essentially the exact same idea! Cheers to you for having it and making it too!
Now I don’t have to! xD
Reddit does a great job at promoting discussion with their design. Why not create a mini-reddit for your site? All but the anti-spam bit is open sourced: https://github.com/reddit/reddit
This is awesome!
I can’t wait to play with it more. Beautiful work and congrats on the big launch!
I am no expert but the goal here is discussion. That means the discussion and content there-of is king.
So why all the extra chrome? Avatars do nothing for discussion. (Same thing with signatures but you already knew that). There is a lot of extra white spacing that doesn’t make sense.
And finally discussion means back and forth. To me, that means you need a nested / threaded system. A ‘flat’ mode is fine for two people going back and forth but as soon as there is another subthread, the flat mode falls quickly into chaos.
I like the presentation of the threads but the threads themselves are still a mess.
I want this to succeed because I too often find myself digging through forums for information and it has to get better. But I would encourage you to see how well sites like Shacknews and Reddit get conversation going without all the chrome.
PS - Sticky threads that are used as a “FAQ” that have 100+ replies instead of a wiki page are another forum annoyance. Figure that one out and you will be the richest person alive.