Um, I’d like to play along, but your create a log in thingy won’t accept my custom domain as a valid eMail address.
Eh?
On the matter of the contributor license agreement / copyright assignment you require, you should know that this has a huge effect on detracting contributors.
See http://lwn.net/Articles/454391/ and Michael Meeks’ various presentations on the effects of “liberating LibreOffice’s development” and not having any CLA’s, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Olx3EvJMl0
Please consider dropping the CLA.
Nothing wrong with making a better TIE Fighter, I mean you could end up creating the TIE Advanced (my favorite starfighter), but I rather think of it that way: with SO, you deconstructed the online forum/BBS, and now you are setting out to reconstruct them. Anyway, I wish you best of luck.
Heh, we were just questioning (for the umpteenth time) why Community Server was still being used on tdwtf, and I hoped at the start of this post that you would come and save us (Alex Papadimoulis insists on a .NET solution and that’s what you traditionally use, would have been nice timing, right…), when I saw the Ruby/Ember stuff. Okayyyy… At least forums (contrary to, say, a CMS) are something you can and typically do put on a separate subdomain so it is not too far-fetched to sign up for separate hosting specifically for the forum, but still I wonder if that won’t impede adoption.
I don’t want to comment on the open-source claim/licensing/CLA stuff; just be careful, you’re risking bringing back the Mark Pilgrim onto the Internet to again trot out the Movable Type licensing vs Wordpress thing.
@Pekka
You’re right. A day later and discourse.org is right in 2nd place on page one of a Google search. I humbly retract my comment!
I want to see:
- Support for RTL (hebrew, arabic, other…)
- Support for TeX. At least in some basic form.
Given your terrible reputation at web accessibility, I’m not going to try it.
I strongly urge you to bring back the good/original Programmers.StackExchange.com
Call it a test if you must. But you’ll likely get a ton of disgruntled users switching over there.
Discharge would be more appropriate.
For those who liked the USENET Newsreaders, check out Siilihai web forum reader http://www.siilihai.com/
I hope Discourse will support TapaTalk or some other API so that it can be read using Siilihai.
I would like to shamelessly plug my Respectful Comments Wordpress plugin.
It changes the text of the “submit comment” button to “My comment respects the blog and its readers.”
Readers who want to comment:
- Read your expectation from them in a one line, easy to understand text.
- Will not skip reading what you expect from them.
- Will not need to click “I have read the terms…”.
Maybe it’s a good idea to also do that in Discourse.
Discourse is “comment” software… not forum software.
I’m not a big fan of “infinite scrollbars” because they make Ctrl-F inconvenient and you never know where you are (the latter is not a problem in your discussion view, but it is a problem in the discussion listing view).
Because it’s entirely based on Javascript, all I get is a blank gray page that says “Loading…” and numerous Javascript errors.
Appearantly my company has blocked some of the Javascript files you are relying on.
I can’t recommend that kind of software to anyone.
Forums are incredibly useful, but like many things on the internet they eventually disappear. Much of the lost internet is recoverable via archive.org but most of the time forums are not.
Is it possible for Discourse to play nice with archive.org?
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.