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Discourse

Feb 27, 2014#1

Covar

http://discourse.org

There used to be a thread about this a while back, but it has since been locked. For those who don't remember that thread, Discourse is modern forum software. It's come a long way since the original thread, and I was wondering if anyone other than myself and @stienman were interested in it.

I've been thinking about setting it up on a local VM and seeing what kind of effort it would take to make themes, do some extremely basic user migration, etc.

Feb 27, 2014#2

Dave

I think it's interesting that they say it's so new but it really looks just like one big forum with differentiation in topics done by thread topic prefixes. And that's not new.

I mean, it's certainly cleaner looking, but I don't see a huge rise in usability. And in the image thread the guy states no images over 1 MB. (The image thread, I might add, that was started by Stienman and even has the same subject line as the one here!) So I wonder about its speed - which we all know is something users obsess over.

Feb 27, 2014#3

Covar

Dave said:
I think it's interesting that they say it's so new but it really looks just like one big forum with differentiation in topics done by thread topic prefixes. And that's not new.

I mean, it's certainly cleaner looking, but I don't see a huge rise in usability. And in the image thread the guy states no images over 1 MB. (The image thread, I might add, that was started by Stienman and even has the same subject line as the one here!) So I wonder about its speed - which we all know is something users obsess over.

That's part of the reason I wanted to mess around with it, and see what kind of interest there is. I don't think it would be beneficial to use here, yet.

Feb 27, 2014#4

strawman

Dave said:
I think it's interesting that they say it's so new but it really looks just like one big forum with differentiation in topics done by thread topic prefixes. And that's not new.

I mean, it's certainly cleaner looking, but I don't see a huge rise in usability. And in the image thread the guy states no images over 1 MB. (The image thread, I might add, that was started by Stienman and even has the same subject line as the one here!) So I wonder about its speed - which we all know is something users obsess over.

Yeah, I stole the thread title from here. The image size limit is just to avoid long load times for people on slow connections.

One of the biggest benefits of discourse is speed. There are a number of features that are better than how typical forums run, but it's not a night and day difference.[DOUBLEPOST=1393530006,1393529902][/DOUBLEPOST]Setting one up and operating it, though, is relatively painful due to the requirements of the software stack chosen. I honestly think they've hobbled themselves a bit on this one.

Feb 27, 2014#5

Dave

stienman said:
Yeah, I stole the thread title from here. The image size limit is just to avoid long load times for people on slow connections.

One of the biggest benefits of discourse is speed. There are a number of features that are better than how typical forums run, but it's not a night and day difference.[DOUBLEPOST=1393530006,1393529902][/DOUBLEPOST]Setting one up and operating it, though, is relatively painful due to the requirements of the software stack chosen. I honestly think they've hobbled themselves a bit on this one.

And it doesn't look like there's much room for addons and such. I know that is probably on purpose, but I like being able to do things like the arcade and (supposedly) the poker addon that is proving to be so insanely difficult to install that the guy who wrote it had a PhD in Horribleness.

Feb 27, 2014#6

Ravenpoe

Dave said:
And it doesn't look like there's much room for addons and such. I know that is probably on purpose, but I like being able to do things like the arcade and (supposedly) the poker addon that is proving to be so insanely difficult to install that the guy who wrote it had a PhD in Horribleness.

Feb 27, 2014#7

strawman

Dave said:
And it doesn't look like there's much room for addons and such. I know that is probably on purpose, but I like being able to do things like the arcade and (supposedly) the poker addon that is proving to be so insanely difficult to install that the guy who wrote it had a PhD in Horribleness.

Yeah, it's only a year old. There's a plugin API, and it should be easy in the future, but it's like the early days of xenforo. It'll take some time, hopefully they do it right though. These are world class programmers, they know a thing or two about extensibility.

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