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I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum rea

by rg111 5y ago

I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord. [0]: https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.
- joeberon 5y ago
  I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
    - dqv 5y ago
      It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
      - joeberon 5y ago
        Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it
  - wavyknife 5y ago
    Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community. I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
    - jlokier 5y ago
      For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress. Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge. Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical. I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback. Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege. I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge. When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me. In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value. For me I think these concrete changes might help: - Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved. - Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics. - Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
  - dbetteridge 5y ago
    - too much whitespace around text. - no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer. - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile). - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Discourse just feel like someone just heard about Web 2.0 and decided to re-implement forum software. I dunno, it’s a sort of uncanny valley where some of the ideas are good but the whole thing just grates on you. I’ve used Flarum as an alternative and been much happier with it.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  Bloat is the problem with discourse, also I heard hard to install on server side (RoR)
- nske 5y ago
  I kind of know why I don't like it: It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app than a good-old website. It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and fanciness. Its setup is also more convoluted than I like.
  - temptemptemp111 5y ago
    Exactly
iggldiggl 5y ago
Weren't they the ones whining a few years ago about how people insisting on using Android phones (as opposed to wonderfully performant iPhones) were threatening their plans for a glorious JS-only full client-side rendering future?
barrenko 5y ago
We've reached a new low in modern hell if this is where we're going. Old bbs php or what was it's name was way more manageable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse made, there could have been a chance.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Forums do indeed have terrible UX… but it says a lot that they still compare favourably to what we have today, in many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes) slightly easier to use (once you know how), but with no instructions.
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      People don't read instructions. If you need instructions on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        [b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like that out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i]italic[/i]… had to be told how to do that. Does that make Hacker News particularly bad?) “Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).
dncornholio 5y ago
Excuse me? $100/month and it's a nice alternative? Guess I was expecting something open source so was a bit flabbergasted.
- input_sh 5y ago
  It is open sourced, that pricing is for them to manage an install for you. From the about page: > We offer official Discourse hosting, or install Discourse yourself in the cloud in under 30 minutes. > Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and forever.
  - dncornholio 5y ago
    I see, makes sense now. Did not find any mention of it while scanning the site though. Seemed like it was a paid service only.
    - hanklazard 5y ago
      I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I’d recommend it if you need this kind of solution.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Yeah I wonder whether they'd go SSPL if AWS started offering hosted Discourse.
- innocenat 5y ago
  Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat, but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one - took forever. And the result didn't run very fast. After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance. I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.
- mceachen 5y ago
  I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a prefab droplet. It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.
arkh 5y ago
The main problem with Discourse is its reliance on javascript. For mostly textual content.
- est31 5y ago
  You can turn js off. Discourse is one of the few websites that have a better experience with javascript turned off than with javascript turned on.
  - arkh 5y ago
    I guess noscript is a little too aggressive as it gives me this on Discourse community forum: https://imgur.com/a/6SnyBZC https://imgur.com/a/6SnyBZC
    - est31 5y ago
      Works great for me when I disable js support in about:config. Seems some missing CSS to me?
  - dqv 5y ago
    Whoa you’re right. It solves most of the gripes I have with Discourse. I wish it had pagination, but this is a huge improvement.
baud147258 5y ago
well, the gaming forums of RockPaperShotguns (video game news website), built on Discourse, are set to close next month, so it's less a technological choice and more how much the maintainer/owner of the forum wants to keep it online
spaniard89277 5y ago
Flarum seems better than Discourse.
chriswarbo 5y ago
Discourse can also be accessed as a mailing list (for those lamenting its use of JS, etc.). Not sure if it requires any different setup, but that's how I interact with the Nix Discourse, for example.
DanAtC 5y ago
Discourse is horrible: It lazy-loads messages which is a nightmare to scroll and search through on mobile.

by rg111 5y ago

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.

joeberon 5y ago
I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
- true_religion 5y ago
  I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
  - dqv 5y ago
    It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it
- wavyknife 5y ago
  Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community. I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
  - jlokier 5y ago
    For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress. Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge. Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical. I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback. Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege. I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge. When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me. In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value. For me I think these concrete changes might help: - Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved. - Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics. - Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
- dbetteridge 5y ago
  - too much whitespace around text. - no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer. - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile). - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
Aeolun 5y ago
Discourse just feel like someone just heard about Web 2.0 and decided to re-implement forum software. I dunno, it’s a sort of uncanny valley where some of the ideas are good but the whole thing just grates on you. I’ve used Flarum as an alternative and been much happier with it.
chakkepolja 5y ago
Bloat is the problem with discourse, also I heard hard to install on server side (RoR)
nske 5y ago
I kind of know why I don't like it: It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app than a good-old website. It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and fanciness. Its setup is also more convoluted than I like.
- temptemptemp111 5y ago
  Exactly

iggldiggl 5y ago

Weren't they the ones whining a few years ago about how people insisting on using Android phones (as opposed to wonderfully performant iPhones) were threatening their plans for a glorious JS-only full client-side rendering future?

barrenko 5y ago

We've reached a new low in modern hell if this is where we're going. Old bbs php or what was it's name was way more manageable.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnWhigham 5y ago
phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse made, there could have been a chance.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Forums do indeed have terrible UX… but it says a lot that they still compare favourably to what we have today, in many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes) slightly easier to use (once you know how), but with no instructions.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    People don't read instructions. If you need instructions on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      [b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like that out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i]italic[/i]… had to be told how to do that. Does that make Hacker News particularly bad?) “Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).

dncornholio 5y ago

Excuse me? $100/month and it's a nice alternative? Guess I was expecting something open source so was a bit flabbergasted.

input_sh 5y ago
It is open sourced, that pricing is for them to manage an install for you. From the about page: > We offer official Discourse hosting, or install Discourse yourself in the cloud in under 30 minutes. > Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and forever.
- dncornholio 5y ago
  I see, makes sense now. Did not find any mention of it while scanning the site though. Seemed like it was a paid service only.
  - hanklazard 5y ago
    I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I’d recommend it if you need this kind of solution.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Yeah I wonder whether they'd go SSPL if AWS started offering hosted Discourse.
innocenat 5y ago
Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat, but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one - took forever. And the result didn't run very fast. After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance. I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.

mceachen 5y ago
I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a prefab droplet. It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.

arkh 5y ago

The main problem with Discourse is its reliance on javascript. For mostly textual content.

est31 5y ago
You can turn js off. Discourse is one of the few websites that have a better experience with javascript turned off than with javascript turned on.
- arkh 5y ago
  I guess noscript is a little too aggressive as it gives me this on Discourse community forum: https://imgur.com/a/6SnyBZC https://imgur.com/a/6SnyBZC
  - est31 5y ago
    Works great for me when I disable js support in about:config. Seems some missing CSS to me?
- dqv 5y ago
  Whoa you’re right. It solves most of the gripes I have with Discourse. I wish it had pagination, but this is a huge improvement.

baud147258 5y ago

well, the gaming forums of RockPaperShotguns (video game news website), built on Discourse, are set to close next month, so it's less a technological choice and more how much the maintainer/owner of the forum wants to keep it online

spaniard89277 5y ago

Flarum seems better than Discourse.

chriswarbo 5y ago

Discourse can also be accessed as a mailing list (for those lamenting its use of JS, etc.). Not sure if it requires any different setup, but that's how I interact with the Nix Discourse, for example.

DanAtC 5y ago

Discourse is horrible: It lazy-loads messages which is a nightmare to scroll and search through on mobile.