> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I think discoverabili

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.