Great software! Are you thinking about supporting WebID-Login and exposing Linked Data?
Jeff, the work youāve done with StackOverflow is amazing. Thatās why Iām a little surprised at this latest effort. Itās quite ā¦ underwhelming.
The three biggest problems with forums:
- Information overload.
- Ugly.
- Difficult to find what youāre 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 wouldnāt recommend it to anyone.
Iām sure you will write about Discourse more. Iāll 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 ā 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 thatās 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, itās not worth getting upset over 
Hi Jeff
Thereāre at least one additional initiative to building new forum software.
Iām 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 āforum software for the
futureā: 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 wonāt.
Iām quoting you from http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html last May:
āOne of the explicit goals of my next project is to do whatever we can to buff up a ā¦ particular ā¦ open source language ecosystem such that it can truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment.ā
Really, with postgres and Rails? Rails is a bitch in itself, but finding postgres competence? Close to impossible, compared to MySQL.
Donāt get me wrong, the forum looks awesome, and I was dying to try it out. But then I realized I couldnāt host it. My employee couldnāt host it. Heck, nobody I KNOW could host it.
@HĆ„vard whatās 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 wasnāt 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 todayās 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, itās not all bad. Thereās a lot there even if itās 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.
Iām excited to poke around with this this weekend. I was just thinking the other day that forums software hasnāt improved much in the last decade, and StackOverflow is so conscientiously designed that I canāt wait to see your take on discussions.
Obviously Iām 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 Iād 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 donāt 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 everyoneās 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 isnāt really any excuse for not having an up-to-date browser with javascript enabled.
Iām 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 agoā¦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.
Any info on performance? A lot of larger forums stick with old s/w because it is the only one that reliable stays up without constant time outs.
Looks greatā¦ butā¦
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis 2.6+
Itās like you want NO-ONE to use it. Rails is still niche and not supported by many (quality) hosts. PostgreSQL is limited, but at least more available, and Redis? Well unless youāre running your own box thatās not likely to happen.
Until itās as easy to install as something like PHPBB this will be a niche thing that people will say āCool, wish it worked on my box but it doesnāt so I guess Iāll use Xā. Until it works on a hosting company solution which is what 99% of forums use it is pointless.
Which is a shame, because it looks cool. Maybe someone will fork it and make it useful to the rest of the world.
Jeff, Iām sure youāve done the competitive analysis on forum comparison sites like http://www.forummatrix.org (Iāve spent about an entire week testing the most promising candidates there).
Vanilla Forums was the most modern open source forum software package I found. What was your overall impression of it?
I tried out discourse and I have to say I loved it, itās definitely where conversing on the web is going. Itās clean, easy to use and my favourite part, itās immersive, you feel much more involved in the conversations than on forums.
This is a little spooky - I prepared a mini-pitch and crappy prototype for exactly this service for a entrepreneur course about a year ago (i called it discuss.it, tho thatās already taken :P). As in exactly the same feature set, down to trust base moderation and direct replies. Clearly thereās really a need for this out there - wish I could have claimed to be the first to make it reality, but hats off to you guys for pulling it off 
Itās about time forums stopped sucking!
p.s. the pitch if youāre curious https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6613592/discussit-pitch.pdf
Iād love to see major newsmagazine sites like Huffington Post adopt your Discourse monitoring software.
Could you add a āflagā for seemingly earnest contributors who make such moronic comments that itās tempting to think they are really trolls?