I get a warm feeling when any area of stagnation gets some TLC through innovation. I think this is a ripe are for change and I’m looking forward to what Jeff and the team come out with.
My only problem with it is that the threading is abjectly terrible. When people reply to a post, it gives nothing but the poster’s name, with no hint of which post or what content until you click on it. Even the first line of post would be a massive improvement and job the memory more than enough. For people who quote a whole post unmodified, I’d argue that should get the same treatment: Collapse to the first line, allow click to full post. Only edited quote should be shown.
I’ve come to appreciate the way my email client collapses all lines from a previous poster, but if you’re doing more than skimming, that’s not good. This is a point where everyone is going to want different things; I like things collapsed, others will like to see point-by-point arguments and rebuttals. So it goes; design sucks.
Great job! I’ve always thinked that web forums needed a technological review! I will absolutely recommend this to my customers!
@Sean - Avatars are something users demand, not developers. Tell users they can’t have something they want, and watch your killer app be ignored. All forum software that has avatars has ways for cantankerous individual users to disable seeing avatars (and images, markup, and other “chrome”), which is far preferable to telling the majority that want it to go screw off.
Why can’t I log in with OpenID? I thought you were supposed to be a big fan?
There’s two aspects to what you’re doing here.
The first is the software itself. Discussion software may have peaked in the 1980s with dial-up BBS forums, which had many useful features and even more importantly integration of those features into a discernible process, and much of this was lost in the 1990s transition to web software. Remember Matt’s Scripts?
The second is community management. Having watched Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News, my conclusion is that most people imitate the successful acts of others from the outside-in. That is, someone has a reason to make a post; others see this post is liked, and so they imitate its form and do not take into account its content and the choices made based on that content that determine its form.
Thus you get threads where 5% of the responses are significant, and the rest are people behaving like monkeys yammering out repeated memes, conventions, stylistic flourishes, demands for attention, etc.
I guess my golden rule is that anything I can script should not be included in the forum. That is, if we all must repeat some line from Seinfeld every time someone makes a grammar correction, I can probably code up a Perl script to watch for grammar-correction-style language and have it post the appropriate gag in response. People shouldn’t be doing that for me; it’s inefficient. 
I hope “Discourse” succeeds. I am skeptical of the voting element however. What makes Stack Overflow succeed, and this seems unacknowledged in your post, is that it is based on a technical topic and on finding a clear answer. That separates it from, say, Slashdot, where the goal is “discussion” (a means, now serving as a goal) on that topic. By putting the clear answer requirement into discussion, you impose a goal, and thus discussion again becomes a means and not an end in itself.
Finding out how to impose that requirement on discussion will lead you to a better form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). I used to think voting systems were the answer, but having watched Reddit turn into a self-censorship circle based on community self-imitation, I don’t trust that. I’m even skeptical of Hacker News upvoting because crowd “knowledge” is bad with low-commitment activities like voting, and it encourages imitative behavior as well. In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the success is not the voting but the fact that the answers can be verified by whether they work or not.
Thanks im going to look at Discourse.
There is a fantastic community building site thats massively well regarded by those in the know. But most people dont know it. www.meetup.com was created as a response to 9/11 to build communities. Using the internet to get people off the internet and meeting up. Its NOT a dating site in any way.
I have run meetup.com/shy-london for the last three years and have 800 members. There are groups for people sharing an interest in almost anything if you live in a major city. Groups are free to join usually.
Just spreading the word.
Does Discourse have features designed to stop a discussion forum being taken over by pompous middlebrow naysayers - something that’s known as the Hacker News effect?
CIX has been doing something like this for 26 years.
First of all, I love it!
Over the past few weeks I’ve been re-building an application in MVC3 which hasn’t been updated in 8 years.
When it came to the forum I had a look around at open-source solutions, but nothing was any improvement over the forum I had built almost a decade ago!
Discourse is definitely a huge improvement, and I for one will be including this in my application as soon as I can get hold of the code
Jeff Atwood,
With StackOverflow you have a lot of experience building with .NET.
I’m curious to know why you decided to use Ruby on Rails for Discourse.
Also, if you were to start StackOverflow from the beginning would you consider Rails?
So, are you going to improve the support for threaded discussions? That (along with keyboard bindings) seems to be the big thing missing. Indeed, it’s something missing from many forum sites, yet it is a key aspect of making old-style discussion software (such as Mozilla Thunderbird, or the USENET readers of old) highly usable.
A discussion is like a tree, not a list. Linearizing it just sucks. (Note that Thunderbird isn’t actually that good at handling discussion trees; it just happens to beat every discussion website I’ve ever seen.)
No OpenID login option… This is the part where I start playing sad trombone in my head.
So, from a user point of view. How is Discourse different from everything else out there? It seems a lot like your run-of-the-mill forum to me?
Is it only in the inner workings and for the administrators that this is a step forward?
When will codinghorror comments be powered by Discourse?
@John re SEO - the project’s been public for 12 hours now. You need to Google some time to pick up on it, it’s a new site.
Linearizing it just sucks.
@Donal - it actually makes it much more readable.
http://notthetalk.com is modelled on the old UK Guardian newspaper discussion forum. The folks there think it’s pretty much the perfect forum format despite being something like 15 years old. Readability not chrome is the key.
@Tim Sullivan - It may be possible to find cheap Rails hosting, but if it’s any harder to set this up than it is to set up phpBB or Simple Machines Forum, it’s probably not going to get WordPress level traction.
I Admin a very large community for writers; Absolutewrite.com/forums.
The software is actually decent; it’s not cheap. vBulletin from Jelsoft.
If you can FTP and read, you can install vBulletin. We’re running an older version; I have the current version on a test forum so members can get used to it before we change their world.
The non-forum parts of vBulletin are ridiculous, for the most part, but the boards are quite flexible.
But what makes the forum work, much as what made forums I’ve adminned for instruction, is active moderation.
Good moderation encourages conversation. Good moderation tools help with that.
@ Lisa - I agree about active moderation but on a fast moving current affairs forum this presents a problem, in the UK at least. If a site is actively moderated and something defamatory is missed then the complainant has a case for defamation against the site. Active moderation also generates a huge workload.
It’s therefore important here to only moderated based on reports from the community although, of course, the admins are part of the community so can report things themselves.