💬 Platform Discussion Discourse

[Ravenfreak]

Have you ever used Discourse forum software before? I feel that lots of commercial websites are starting to use more modern forum platforms, and Discourse seems to be a very popular modern forum. Honestly in my opinion, it's too expensive and it looks bland and boring. For the basic plan you're looking at spending $25 each month just for the first year, then $50 a month afterwards! You can only have up to 100 members on your community on the basic plan, doesn't really sound like it's worth it. If you want to learn more, here's the link to their site. https://discourse.org/

 

[Arantor]

I have. Good luck getting it running on a host unless you're reasonable proficient - you're not doing it on anything less than a VPS, but the bottom most plan ($5/month) on Digital Ocean will be enough for a starting forum.

So, fun fact, I used to frequent a forum that was full of *very* technical people. Also, very intolerant of stupid. Very, very intolerant of stupid. And their forum from like 2006 to 2014 was a thing called Community Server. The community at large, being very technical people, had great sport hijacking the forum and doing things with it that it wasn't designed to do. Like adding speech bubbles to the poster above you's avatar, through careful code in your signature.

And in 2014, the site owner - who happened to be friends with Discourse's founder - agreed to migrate to Discourse.

Oh dear.

This was, as I say, 2014, so this was early Discourse and I daresay that group of people were the best round of QA Discourse had because this was a group of people who build software, who *do* software and who aren't afraid to say *exactly* what they think. So all the technical issues we found - and we found some utter howlers, up to and including breaking the entire forum for hours at a time just by trying to log in in a very specific way - they all got fixed.

The straw for the camel, though, was Jeff Atwood, its founder. You see, this was early days and Jeff still really really stood by the mission of Discourse's underlying company, "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit". In his mind, the reason forums were so awful is not just because the "90s toxic hellstew forum software" was bad and needed a rethink, the culture needed shifting too. And we learned about this the hard way - take a well established community, change software (with agreement from the community), but then let that software's team come in as moderators and... *aggressively* moderate.

Jeff has a few beliefs. Topics should be short and stay on topic. Even though that's not what people do, they go off topic and meander and prevaricate. At one point it was likened to being at a party and told, 'Oh you want to discuss *that*? Please go in the next room.'

And Jeff *did* proactively police this, locking topics and splitting topics that he thought were too long/inappropriate/off-topic etc. etc. as this is "uncivilised behaviour". I believe the letter to the admin asking him to remove Jeff was for many years the single most liked post on the site.

And if you're feeling brave, this is the post uncensored and full of expletives and anger: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11531/i-m-a-grumpy-cat-an-open-letter-to-alex for context: Alex is the admin, Lorne was a contributor to the site and the forum. It is from Discourse's early days, and early in its adoption. The site moved off Discourse approximately 2 years later. But only after so much anger and hate. I had so many arguments with Jeff myself as well, seeing how I'd spent a large chunk of 2009-2014 myself on forum software which I thought entitled me to voice my own thoughts, especially when he was openly and actively dismissing what I had helped work on as 'toxic hellstew'.

I don't know if Discourse is *better* now. A breeze through meta.discourse.org doesn't fill me with great belief that it is wildly different but the most striking feeling I get is that Jeff finally listened to what he was being told and dialled it back a bit on the rhetoric because some of the things we told him in 2014 have been adopted in part in the years since. But I'm not sure I'd call that 'better'. It's different, and it has a few interesting ideas implemented... less than optimally... but honestly... I see Discourse in a few places and I don't tend to stay long.

 

[Kale]

I used it once or so, and it was alright. I still would much rather use XenForo or something else over it. I didn't really have the forum that long to determine if it'd be good to run a forum with it.

 

[Cedric]

I have. Good luck getting it running on a host unless you're reasonable proficient - you're not doing it on anything less than a VPS, but the bottom most plan ($5/month) on Digital Ocean will be enough for a starting forum.

So, fun fact, I used to frequent a forum that was full of *very* technical people. Also, very intolerant of stupid. Very, very intolerant of stupid. And their forum from like 2006 to 2014 was a thing called Community Server. The community at large, being very technical people, had great sport hijacking the forum and doing things with it that it wasn't designed to do. Like adding speech bubbles to the poster above you's avatar, through careful code in your signature.

And in 2014, the site owner - who happened to be friends with Discourse's founder - agreed to migrate to Discourse.

Oh dear.

This was, as I say, 2014, so this was early Discourse and I daresay that group of people were the best round of QA Discourse had because this was a group of people who build software, who *do* software and who aren't afraid to say *exactly* what they think. So all the technical issues we found - and we found some utter howlers, up to and including breaking the entire forum for hours at a time just by trying to log in in a very specific way - they all got fixed.

The straw for the camel, though, was Jeff Atwood, its founder. You see, this was early days and Jeff still really really stood by the mission of Discourse's underlying company, "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit". In his mind, the reason forums were so awful is not just because the "90s toxic hellstew forum software" was bad and needed a rethink, the culture needed shifting too. And we learned about this the hard way - take a well established community, change software (with agreement from the community), but then let that software's team come in as moderators and... *aggressively* moderate.

Jeff has a few beliefs. Topics should be short and stay on topic. Even though that's not what people do, they go off topic and meander and prevaricate. At one point it was likened to being at a party and told, 'Oh you want to discuss *that*? Please go in the next room.'

And Jeff *did* proactively police this, locking topics and splitting topics that he thought were too long/inappropriate/off-topic etc. etc. as this is "uncivilised behaviour". I believe the letter to the admin asking him to remove Jeff was for many years the single most liked post on the site.

And if you're feeling brave, this is the post uncensored and full of expletives and anger: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11531/i-m-a-grumpy-cat-an-open-letter-to-alex for context: Alex is the admin, Lorne was a contributor to the site and the forum. It is from Discourse's early days, and early in its adoption. The site moved off Discourse approximately 2 years later. But only after so much anger and hate. I had so many arguments with Jeff myself as well, seeing how I'd spent a large chunk of 2009-2014 myself on forum software which I thought entitled me to voice my own thoughts, especially when he was openly and actively dismissing what I had helped work on as 'toxic hellstew'.

I don't know if Discourse is *better* now. A breeze through meta.discourse.org doesn't fill me with great belief that it is wildly different but the most striking feeling I get is that Jeff finally listened to what he was being told and dialled it back a bit on the rhetoric because some of the things we told him in 2014 have been adopted in part in the years since. But I'm not sure I'd call that 'better'. It's different, and it has a few interesting ideas implemented... less than optimally... but honestly... I see Discourse in a few places and I don't tend to stay long.

I'm gonna give that a read when I've got a lot of time. 😅 The guy spend 2 hours typing his rage.

I haven't used it before, nor would I ever want to. 25USD for only 100 members is ridiculous.

 

[Arantor]

The guy spend 2 hours typing his rage.

Lorne was an angry guy. But we all spent time in our own ways raging against the stupid.

We definitely stress-tested the software for things like 'long topics' which weren't supported at all when we first test-drove it - topics more than a couple of hundred posts were exponentially slower than topics that were shorter, and we broke it hard-core the first time we broke the 1000 posts barrier. And we pushed it harder and harder with the stupid likes topic, haha. Because Discourse does the live previewing/live updating thing, you could almost treat it like a chatbox/shoutbox at times. Which is not a good look.

I think the funniest moment was the point at which Atwood said something to the effect that because you had to be running JavaScript to post, you couldn't spam it with a spambot. The community put together a bot literally that weekend to prove him wrong.

Do note that you can self-host Discourse for free but you are basically expected to deal with issues yourself, and if you're using anything other than the official Docker images, you are completely on your own or near enough.

Also note that the $25/month is a temporary discount - it's normally $50/month for the basic hosted edition.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Just recently it seems that Discourse integrated a new feature where admins can change threads to wiki posts. Meaning that users in certain groups can edit posts, and there's a preview of the previous version of the post. I suppose it's a good feature for those who are wanting to have a community that could also benefit from having a wiki within the forum itself. I was also wrong in the OP thinking this was commercial software lol, I just assumed it was paid software because of how the front page of their site is set up.

 

[Arantor]

I don't think this was particularly new; our lot in 2014 was doing something of this ilk with the 'Discopedia' collecting all the various comical ways we found to break it, and certainly the edit history functionality isn't new.

We did note at the time that there were facilities for moving posts between topic-types, e.g. we found it was possible to convert PMs to posts (eek.) so having wiki posts isn't a large stretch if everything's a post.