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Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

• tomjen3 14y ago
  Wait this thing is written in Rails? Just a few days ago Patio11 mentioned that the only good thing about the recent security issues was that Rails didn't have an app similar to wordpress that would be installed everywhere and never updated. And now, this.
  • tnorthcutt 14y ago
    Yes, and? (Not trying to be snippy, but really, what is your point?)
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    Well, we hope that we can popularize Rails to better approach the "it just works on every server everywhere" PHP ubiquity. And what's, er, worse? PHP everywhere, or Ruby everywhere?
    • mikey_p 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure the real threat is unpatched apps, regardless of what language they're written in (which was tomjen3's point). I'm concerned that the relative complexity of upgrading a Rails app with bundler and application server, webserver, etc is significant compared to the steps to upgrade the average PHP app (copy the new files over the old ones). Then again, perhaps an even bigger threat is people who feel smug about security due to their choice of programming language, which is what you seem to be hinting at.
    • davidmurdoch 14y ago
      "If your hosting account is listed as Shared Hosting, you cannot install Ruby on Rails." - GoDaddy. I dislike PHP as much as the next guy, but if your goal really is ubiquity, you've forgotten a decently large segment of the e-population. :-/
  • igravious 14y ago
    What's with all the Rails hate? It's getting tiring already. We're not going to stop loving and using Ruby and it's cute little sibling Rails because of a few hiccups so get over it already, ok?
  • samspot 14y ago
    He meant that it is a good thing, right now, that there are isn't an application like that (because it would expose so much of the web). That being said, I'm hesitant to try this until ruby calms down a bit.
  • mortenjorck 14y ago
    This won't happen as long as Rails apps can't be hosted on a $4.99 / month shared host, uploaded through Filezilla, and hooked up to a MySQL DB created through a visual control panel, all in the span of ten minutes. The barrier to entry for deploying a Rails app is high enough that it's unlikely a significant number of deployments will be installed and forgotten like so many PHP packages.
    • AnthonBerg 14y ago
      Deploying to Heroku fixes this. If not actually deploying to Heroku, then the spirit of doing it the same way which will probably come about in other implementations.
  • patio11 14y ago
    That isn't quite what I meant by that line. (I was pointing out an ironic upside of decisively losing the CMS war to Wordpress.) "Never use Rails ever and especially not for installed apps" is very, very far from what I think. Though if I were doing anything installable I'd put a channel for security notices on the admin panel like Wordpress does.
• zacharydanger 14y ago
  Looks neat. Wish there were some code to poke around in, though.
  • moserware 14y ago
    https://github.com/discourse/core https://github.com/discourse/core
    • zacharydanger 14y ago
      Thanks. Didn't immediately see the "Fork Us" button.
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• heartbreak 14y ago
  Discourse is a significant upgrade from phpBB. Awesome.
  • evoxed 14y ago
    ...and vBulleting, InvisionBoard, etc. (Not free, but that's what all the 'cool kids' had not-so-way-back...) I'm very interested in trying this out. Besides the nostalgic kick of having dedicated forums come back the potential for moving forums forward is pretty great.
• showerst 14y ago
  Remind me of LiveFyre or Disqus. Speaking of the wordpress of forums, does anyone have experience with http://bbpress.org/ http://bbpress.org/ ?
• pcestrada 14y ago
  Wow... another multi-million user platform has just been born.
  • lukev 14y ago
    Not necessarily. StackOverflow was much needed by a well-defined userbase, and unique in its approach. This is much more open-ended, and however nice it might be, there are other products attempting the same thing already.
    • codinghorror 14y ago
      It's much more meta, for one thing. SO had a topic: programming. Here we don't have any particular topic, our goal is to make your topic successful, whatever it is, through open source software and community. In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be successful.
• lukev 14y ago
  Modern forum software is much-needed, so I'm glad to see this out there. But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.
  • tikhonj 14y ago
    StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work. I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.
    • hollerith 14y ago
      >StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work. The design's being so busy has prevented me from exploring the site. I wish I knew of a browser extension or a bookmarklet to make the site more sedate by, e.g., deleting some of the elements on the page.
      • bcoates 14y ago
        I sometimes use adblock as an incredibly blunt instrument to delete unwanted page elements.
        • illuminate 14y ago
          Isn't that what https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelpe... is for?
      • skeletonjelly 14y ago
        User CSS in browser has existed for a while IIRC. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
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• jiggy2011 14y ago
  It's great that they are offering this as a thing you can actually download and put on your own server or rent from a commodity hosting provider. The great thing about traditional forums was that they made it possible to host discussions on controversial topics without fearing being culled by the platform owner. They also allow forum admins to be entirely free to set their own rules and create a marketplace in third party extensions.
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    Completely, forums are about basic human expression in paragraph form. This is an essential right and we want to give it back to the world in 100% no strings attached open source form. Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I want to use.
• tomdale 14y ago
  I've been beta testing Discourse for a few months now, and can tell you that this is going to have a huge impact on how we have discussions online. Jeff Atwood has more insights into how humans communicate in an hour than I do in a year. Those insights are built right into the software, and I think that will help many communities take off that would otherwise collapse under the weight of trolls and apathy. On a more selfish note, I'm excited to have an open source Ember.js app available from two of the best JavaScript developers in the world—Robin Ward and Sam Saffron. It's a great resource for the Ember community. If you haven't yet, make sure you head over to GitHub and check out what a modern Ember app looks like.
  • raganwald 14y ago
    What problem does Discourse solve that Hacker News doesn't solve right now? EDIT: Obviously it has a modern, nice interface. That's a win. But I mean more specifically, what problem of human dynamics does it solve that Hacker News doesn't solve?
    • angersock 14y ago
      It's GPL, so I can plug it into my own nefarious schemes and makes miiiiiiiillions.
    • MrMcDowall 14y ago
      You realize Discourse isn't just for the hacker crowd?
      • raganwald 14y ago
        Yes, but Jeff's post seems to suggest that there's something special in the design that contributes to more civilized discussion. I'm curious as to what that is. For example, does having a modern interface do that all by itself? Is there something special about the moderation interface? Little tricks isomorphic to the way HN makes you wait before replying to replies, and so on? Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.
• pgrote 14y ago
  I wonder what the vBulletin folks think about this. They've been the market leader for years.
  • angersock 14y ago
    First place in the remedial English spelling bee.
• polskibus 14y ago
  I'd rather see more information on one page than fixed width layout. Some threads can get veeery long and you have to go through a lot of comments to get to answer that is most important to you. Are you guys planning on experimenting with different layouts, or you'd rather not diverge from stackoverflow path ?
• DanBC 14y ago
  I'm interested to know how they'll handle the meta stuff that can kill some forums. All the vested_contributors or trolls or etc.
• togasystems 14y ago
  A one click button to export from phpBB and vBulletin would be amazing.
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much technical and social friction to wholesale forum change. And it's early, very early in our beta! Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.
    • daniel_reetz 14y ago
      I definitely need an importer to be able to use Discourse. I have been looking for a way to get away from PHPBB for years, and would happily move to Discourse, but if I can't bring my content and user posts with me, my community won't follow, either. Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts you could make.
• wpeterson 14y ago
  I'm interested to see a new tech stack for Discourse vs. StackExchange: Ember.js and Rails backend vs. C#/.NET
  • tnorthcutt 14y ago
    I suspect the dichotomy might have something to do with open-source vs. proprietary.
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• speeder 14y ago
  Whoa, this is even more awesome than Postline! Well, granted, Postline still uses frames, and I know only one site that uses it (and I tried using it once, got too confused and dropped out)
• andrewnez 14y ago
  It would be great to see these vendored gems individually released for use in other projects: https://github.com/discourse/core/tree/master/vendor/gems https://github.com/discourse/core/tree/master/vendor/gems
  • sams99 14y ago
    on the cards, message bus really is awesome, I plan to blog about it. can you put a request on meta for this? Also I would like to release the "general consumption" gems as MIT
• recoiledsnake 14y ago
  Wow, this is exactly what the internet needs. Hopefully XDA developers moves to this. I am not sure that XDA is a good fit for Discourse, but the forums they use are exactly the wrong thing to use for such a site. Builtin forum search is just terrible. Improve just that and using forums will be 3x better.
• jacoblyles 14y ago
  I always thought reddit would turn into the next-gen forum, especially after it went open source. But it didn't have as big of an impact as I hoped. reddit is a giant step beyond things like phpBB.
• peterjmag 14y ago
  I cringed when I saw infinite scrolling as the first feature they're highlighting on the landing page. I expected it to completely break back/forward navigation (a la returning to your home page feed on Facebook or Twitter). However, I played around with the demo a bit, and I was pleased to see that they've somehow solved that problem. I'm still not a huge fan of infinite scrolling in general, but this looks like a significant improvement.
  • tomjen3 14y ago
    I haven't tried it, but infinity scrolling is horrible, as is pagination. There is no limit on the size of webpages, so don't put artificial limits on them. Database can't handle the load? Put caching in.
    • jimmaswell 14y ago
      Pagination as in when a forum displays its topics in numbered pages? I've never had a problem with that.
      • tomjen3 14y ago
        Pagination as in whenever it is used. Ever tried to read a long article online? I have seen them split over 15 pages. And yes, I always click the print/view on one page button. And it is even more insulting with comments -- I am not going to click/scroll just to see ten more comments.
  • sp332 14y ago
    There are non-terrible ways of doing infinite scrolling, they just take a lot of work. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    Thanks. I'll probably write up a blog post of how it's done eventually but the short version is we use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll down a topic stream, so you have a unique URL to go back to and share. There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the state, but links to other topics push the state. Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge headache.
• seivan 14y ago
  WOW! This whole thing smells like quality. Even to the usage of CoffeeScript through and through. You guys rock! Been going through the assets/js and it's really amazing quality code.
• UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  JIT loading of comments, eww... You say it "remembers my place" but does it remember my place across all of my devices? What if I want to link my friend to a comment? What about SEO, will my community turn up in google/bing's results?
  • dangrossman 14y ago
    > What if I want to link my friend to a comment? The fact that there's a permalink bar on every single comment was the first thing I noticed, since it highlights on hover anywhere on the comment. http://try.discourse.org/t/this-site-is-a-sandbox-it-is-reset-every-day/57/37 http://try.discourse.org/t/this-site-is-a-sandbox-it-is-rese... If you `wget` the canonical URL of the page per the meta tags, it contains all of the comments in the HTML; everything is accessible to the search spiders.
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    1. If you log in across various devices you'll end up with links to the last post you read in the topic. Unlike other forum software we don't consider all posts on a "page" viewed when the page downloads, only as they are scrolled into view. 2. We use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll. Just grab the link from the URL bar and it'll take you to where you left off. Or additionally click the "Share button" for a copy and pastable pop up. 3. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for google indexing.
    • andrzejkrzywda 14y ago
      > 3. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for google indexing. Can you explain it in more detail? Are you returning different results to Google bots?
      • EvilTrout 14y ago
        No, we were worried that rendering different content for google violates their TOS. So what we do is render a super basic version of the page in the <noscript> section with no tools or extras. You can see it if you disable javascript in your browser. It's not much to use, but enough for google to get at the words and links. We're not sure how well it works since the project was secret until today! We're going to keep an eye on it and adjust for maximum google-fu going forward. (Shout out to Sam Saffron who implemented this!)
• Lagged2Death 14y ago
  Forum software is often clunky and old-fashioned graphic-design-wise, and its search features often are broken, and I'm sure it's not a barrel of laughs to moderate or administrate. But what specifically about the user interaction and user experience is wrong about old forum software that is corrected in this new platform? The sandbox forum is very nice looking but does it operate much differently from old-school stuff? Ultimately I'm looking at a list of topics sorted by how recently they've been updated (and there doesn't even appear to be a way to change that order).
• eranation 14y ago
  A bit off topic, since this is done in Rails, and we all read the dreadful warnings about the remote code execution exploit, how safe is it now? (I plan to run internally at work)? Are the latest YAML vulnerabilities patched? Just do 'gem update rails' often? Also is the rubygems.org exploit behind us?
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    Not only does it run the latest stable release of Rails 3.2 (which was immune from the latest security vunerability), but I made sure we are running the latest versions of all Rubygems. Having said that, this is very much an early beta right now. We expect to get a lot of feedback over the next little while, and we want to integrate that before we release a 1.0 stable that we'd be comfortable telling many people to install. If you install it now, you'll have a more complicated upgrade path to our 1.0.
• ferongr 14y ago
  It's something that many people will consider pretty according to today's trends (fixed-width text, rounded corners and gradients and monochromatic icons and tooltips) but from reading the announcement I expected something more. Looking around the Discourse site, I just can't find what makes Discourse special and my first reaction after 5 minutes of poking around was "Well, okay...". Maybe someone else can explain it to me.
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    You have to look at the other choices to appreciate part of it. I know, this is a little bit like saying "we are the prettiest object in a room full of ugly objects".. but.. well, see for yourself: http://www.forumcon.com/ http://www.forumcon.com/ There are very, very few 1st tier forums that are fully open source, too. None that I know of!
• jotux 14y ago
  It's pretty but years of reddit and hacker news make it very difficult for me to follow message boards without nested comments.
• fragmede 14y ago
  I'd argue that Reddit and other link-aggregation sites like HN are the evolution of the online messsage board to an online-focused format, though self/text posts are possible to start general discussion. The big thing missing is a way to 'sticky/pin' posts, though Reddit makes use of the sidebar to similar effect. How Discourse's conversation threading model is quite interesting though, I'll be interested to see how well it scales.
  • shane-t 14y ago
    I agree with you for the most part -- but how many times do you return to an old HN or Reddit thread a few hours later? It's very hard to see which comments are new. Even though I like threaded discussion I get a warm feeling about seeing that new posts notification on a flat thread I was posting in earlier, and it will make me go back and read the new posts, whereas on Reddit or HN I usually only go back if someone replied to me.
• judofyr 14y ago
  Judging from the beta (http://try.discourse.org/ http://try.discourse.org/) it doesn't seem to provide anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current implementation (it's just an expandable <blockquote> and doesn't really help me understand the context). What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit": - Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community. - Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future. - Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments. - Encourage longer responses. There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys_of_having_a_forever_project_whats_your/c81gng9 http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...
  • dragonfax 14y ago
    Yeah, I have to agree. Reading his blog post, and then the documentation on the site, I got the image of some great new designs to manage the "Information Architecture" of an online persistent discussion (a thread). But instead when I actually logged in and browsed around, all I got was reddit with nicer formatting. Weak.
  • mtrimpe 14y ago
    If it's anything like StackOverflow then the focus will most likely be on nailing the gamification of moderation. As far as building it for a real community goes; judging from their 'Buy it' page it seems that's exactly what they're planning to do next.
    • codinghorror 14y ago
      We really, really wanted a badging system in at launch but just could not get it done in time. It is a very high priority. We view badges as alternatives to reading FAQs and community guidelines.
• csense 14y ago
  How does the infinite scrolling work when you have topics with 10000+ posts? I'm halfway tempted to install it and learn the API just to answer this question.
  • dangrossman 14y ago
    The infinite scrolling works in both directions (up and down). There's a "jump to last post" and "jump to first post" navigation aid to the right of the comment list. You can also start anywhere in the middle of a conversation if someone gives you the permalink to that comment. No matter where in the conversation you begin, only a limited number of comments are preloaded into the page (before/after your current position), and the rest get loaded as you scroll down or up. If you're a search spider or other bot loading the canonical URL of the discussion, it's rendered in plain HTML and paged into multiple HTML pages if very long.
    • tomjen3 14y ago
      I often read things on the bus over a not so stable 3g connection. How does infinity scroll work with that?
      • dangrossman 14y ago
        You're far too young to be a luddite -- the only difference between infinite scroll and paging is whether the action is initiated by swipe or click. If you have a connection, you get more comments, if you don't, you don't. Maybe you have to reload or click the permalink to a comment to try again; you have to jump through the same hoops if you clicked a page link without a connection. When you do have a connection, infinite scroll is preferable on 3G since only some JSON has to be loaded rather than a full page of HTML wrapping it.
• MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  If the goal of this is to supplant vBulletin and phpBB, it has to be written in PHP, period. A non-programming community is not going to deploy a RoR app, they're going to FTP some files into the hosting they just bought from GoDaddy.
  • chrismcbride 14y ago
    Doesn't seem that much harder http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1091/installing-a-ruby-on-rails-application http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1091/installing-a-ru...
    • benatkin 14y ago
      No.
  • heartbreak 14y ago
    If you look on the discourse.org website, they are planning to eventually sell a hosted version (including custom domains). Discourse is taking VC funding, and that's their plan for making money.
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    Once upon a time people said that creating stuff in PHP was ridiculous as Perl in cgi-bin was way more supported. As was mentioned, we have a hosted offering planned so people can set up a forum in a few clicks. But besides that we actively want to work to make Ruby apps easier to install. Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that. At the very least we'll offer VM images and install scripts for various cloud hosts.
    • benatkin 14y ago
      RoR just isn't good at this. It's had more than enough time to position itself as an alternative to PHP. Node looks promising.
      • 14y ago
• mnicole 14y ago
  Any differences between this and Vanilla (http://vanillaforums.com/ http://vanillaforums.com/), which has an abundance of community-created add-ons (http://vanillaforums.org/addon/browse/plugins http://vanillaforums.org/addon/browse/plugins) and the ability to really customize the forum to however you want it? I'm on a board that uses it, and we've been able to integrate inline private conversations into public threads, multi-user private conversations, the ability to draw a post instead of write one, etc.
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those irritating. Vanilla is certainly much more mature since it's been out longer. Discourse is new as of today, so we've got a long way to go.
    • mnicole 14y ago
      > A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those irritating. Vanilla is too, they just charge if you host with them and want customer support. Best of luck to you guys!
      • codinghorror 14y ago
        Not true, the open source version of vanilla does not contain all the features. Certain features are pay only.
• ayanb 14y ago
  Purely from a code standpoint, this is a pretty awesome repository to browse if you want to see how rails, redis, sidekiq, postgresql, pg's hstore, ember.js all tie up! Gemfile gives a pretty good overview - https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/Gemfile https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/Gemfile
• notatoad 14y ago
  It doesn't appear to be responsive, is there a mobile version? The biggest problem i see with phpBB and the like is that they're a huge pain in the ass on any sort of mobile device, and then you get abominations like tapatalk filling the void. If somebody wanted to solve a problem with online discussion software, that's where I'd start.
  • ville 14y ago
    From their github readme: This vision translates to the following functional commitments: 1. Support all contemporary browsers on the desktop: Internet Explorer 9.0, 10.0+ Firefox 16+ Google Chrome infinite 2. Supporting the latest generation of tablets: iPad 2+ Android 4.1+ on 7" and 10" Windows 8 3. Deliver support for mobile/smartphones as soon as possible: Windows Phone 8 iPhone 4+ Android 4.0+ So it seems that mobile support is coming, "as soon as possible".
• jjsz 14y ago
  I'm patiently waiting until the heroku instructions come out. Thank you, also waiting for the donate button.
  • AnthonBerg 14y ago
    Trying to get a dyno up atm. It's fun.
• Joeboy 14y ago
  On vaguely this subject, I had an idea that I mean to implement but so far haven't found time. The idea was for a captcha-type system that required the user to match bad arguments to whatever logical fallacy they fell into, eg. they'd have to match "If we tolerate homosexuality, how long before it becomes normal for people to marry their pets?" to "slippery slope fallacy". I think requiring people to answer a few of these correctly might raise the standard of online discussion, both by keeping dumb people out and setting a tone of reasoned debate. Please steal this idea, as I don't know when I'll find time to do it.
  • saraid216 14y ago
    Seems to me this would have the disadvantage of being a maintenance hassle, i.e., not providing the CAPTCHA half of the functionality very well because of a finite number of questions. Of course, if you're willing to not care about that, it'd be cool.
    • Joeboy 14y ago
      Describing it as a "captcha-type system" was probably misleading, it's not intended to solve the problem of computers being able to match the answers easily. It's intended to require people to either know or learn about common logical fallacies.
  • jccc 14y ago
    Not objecting to the specific idea, but ... I'd prefer to think more about ways to elevate everyone's contribution than just about ways to filter people we perceive to be unhelpful. (Unfortunately that requires letting go of us-vs.-them, and just speaking for myself, that's surprisingly difficult and ongoing work.) Elevating everyone's contribution seems to be the thrust of much of the features in Discourse.
  • bct 14y ago
    That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate arguments. Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of fallacies.
• akavlie 14y ago
  Check out the browser requirements. IE10+, Chrome 24+... wow. http://www.discourse.org/faq/ http://www.discourse.org/faq/
  • Zikes 14y ago
    Normally when I'm working on a new project without clearly defined platform requirements, I'll start with most the modern platforms available and then work my way backwards. It speeds up development and causes less grief.
  • notahacker 14y ago
    I noticed that as well. If your userbase looks a bit like StackOverflow's or HN's it's probably not such a big deal. If your userbase isn't a bunch of developers, designers or early adopters and looks more like W3counter's then 14% of your potential desktop users (tested IE8, presumably similar on 7) get a loading screen when accessing the try.discourse.org demo. If the apparent limitations to IE9 support are significant, that's a quarter of a potential userbase that can't effectively participate in a community, at least not without writing new code - presumably connected with the infinite scroll feature - to support still-common legacy browsers. Say what you like about the crappiness of php forum software, but their designs that haven't been updated since about 2001 just work.
• ori_b 14y ago
  I have yet to see anything that can beat a good old fashioned mailing list for discussion, sadly.
• huslage 14y ago
  This is still a friggin popularity contest. Why do communities need to have any sort of popularity metric attached to each comment (favorites, upvotes, etc)? There are sites that are meant for this (hacker news), but that doesn't mean the methods are generally applicable or even desirable.
  • bryanlarsen 14y ago
    Agreed. There needs to be some sort of mechanism to flag trolls, etc. This same mechanism can be used to rank by popularity. This doesn't mean it should be used that way unless you actually want to promote shallowness and group-think.
• patrickmay 14y ago
  Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly. My ideal discussion forum software would support threading, would remember which messages I've read and which I haven't, would allow me to rate both messages and authors, would provide a personal killfile, and would allow me to use whatever client I prefer to access it. In short, it would be Usenet exposed via a web API. No discussion forum software I've seen so far comes even close in features and usability to what GNUS provided in the 1990s.
  • lutusp 14y ago
    > Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly. Yes, and the reason people (mostly) don't use Usenet is because it was free, meaning you couldn't turn it into a property and make people sign up. As you point out in your wish list, Usenet had a number of very nice usability features. And, notwithstanding a lot of time and effort, they haven't been duplicated in the modern era.
    • patrickmay 14y ago
      You don't consider my $5 per month to Supernews to be a good monetization model? ;-) The clear need that the OP is trying to address suggests that Usenet might be monetizable now. Many web sites aren't going to want to store large amounts of historical text from their user forums. Perhaps there is a market for hosting forums using NNTP under the covers. Each site could provide a default web interface but also allow access via the users' preferred news readers. Decoupling the GUI from the service is good practice in any case.
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    We are closer to your vision than you might think. Discourse remembers what you've read and what you haven't. You can "like" posts or "flag" them as poor. Our API coverage is almost 100% - our rich JS client consumes our own API for just about everything, so we actually know it's working because the client wouldn't work without it. We also have an (admittedly undocumented) plugin system, where you can install rubygems that add or remove functionality from the core app.
• bernardom 14y ago
  I'm surprised that he compared forums to stackexchange and the customer service sites (uservoice, desk, etc), but didn't mention Quora. That said, open source forum software sucks, so thank you!
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    What is Quora?
    • georgemcbay 14y ago
      Answer #1: Quora is a question and answer website. To see more answers, please login to Quora so we can show everyone what you've been looking at on Quora. ...
• mikeleeorg 14y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind starting a new business entity for this product? Will there be a different management team here, separate from Stack Exchange, Inc., or is Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. a subsidiary of SE? Just curious. EDIT: Nevermind, just found the answer to my question: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-to-stack-exchange-for-the-best-reason-ever/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-to-s... (I didn't realize Jeff had left SE.)
• bonaldi 14y ago
  Oh dear, this is what I feared from The People That Brought You StackOverflow: Numbers everywhere. Thousands of tiny icons, all alike. Stackoverflow seems to me to be a giant case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. "We made a site driven by points and numbers and rules and gamification and it was success, therefore it was the numbers and gamification that did it". No, SO was a success because the tech world was gasping for a forum that wasn't a) mailing lists or b) expertsexchange. That's all. That's why the majority of their non-tech sites have bombed. If Discourse is a success it will be because phpBB is hideous, not because of any merits shown here. A better model to ape would have been the truly successful community sites -- think the Well, or Metafilter. Flat. UI that gets out the way. Humans are superb at managing conversations, tracking threads and managing state. It's how forums manage to be so good despite phpBB and the like. Let the humans get on with it. Get out the way.
  • codinghorror 14y ago
    We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin. The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it. And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.
    • eps 14y ago
      I have to agree with the OP. While Discourse design looks different from vBulletin and phpBB, it's unfortunately just another variety of the same. It is busy and it's ... uhm ... giddy if you will. Why the heck does every message need a full toolbar of buttons, for example? Badges, counters - I think others are right, the gamification of SE wasn't the reason for its success. In fact, it might've pushed away more qualified posters than it actually attracted. Why not try something different, or at least make all the paraphernalia optional? Take a look at the Pivory project - that's a great take on design that doesn't stick out, but doesn't hinder the usage either. Adopt something similar as your default theme, kill the badges and you will have a discussion software that is dramatically better than vBulletin, across the board.
• jeremysmyth 14y ago
  I've been playing with this for the last 20 minutes, and there are things I really like and things I don't like. The good: It's got a lot of the automatic things that make Stack Exchange a pleasure to use - conversations slide into place nicely, infinite scrolling feels nice and new, and updates to conversations happen while you're watching. The bad: The front page is already very noisy, and it's only in test mode. I expect that with time, the only way to use this properly will involve creating "channels" with tagging or filtering. There are two major problems with this outcome. Firstly, if users select their own "channels", it becomes a reinforcing cycle where each "channel" (or "room") is only exposed to its own conversation. This is largely what happened with USENET (and to a degree what happens with subreddits), and while each one might be good if it stays small, if it doesn't it'll end up being as noisy as the front page. If managed well, on the other hand, I expect that the prettiness of conversations as they are now will follow nicely into each channel. The second problem with the noisy front page is that as with every other general purpose discussion site with a front page, there will be a race to the bottom, where everything that makes it to the front page will be about grumpy cats or hot girls. Maybe my criticisms stem from the very nature of discussion forums (look at the cycle of slashdot, digg, reddit etc.), but I don't see this tech fixing that problem like Stack Overflow claims to have solved the Q&A problem. I'd like to think it will though.
• mandlar 14y ago
  I'm really surprised to not see a .NET backend especially since StackOverflow, etc. was built on .NET MVC. I would love to hear the design decision behind that.
  • michielvoo 14y ago
    According to Jeff Atwood: "Well, I love .NET -- it is amazingly fast and incredibly well designed" "But for open source projects, there's just too much friction in a Microsoft stack. So it was either Python or Ruby and @eviltrout had an extensive Ruby background, so... here we are." Source: http://try.discourse.org/t/-net-vs-ruby/415/11 http://try.discourse.org/t/-net-vs-ruby/415/11 (That forum is reset every day, so this link will expire soon)
• tnorthcutt 14y ago
  Will this eventually look better on small screens? Right now it's lackluster (I'm on an iPhone 5).
• jimmaswell 14y ago
  Forums haven't changed in 10 years because they got it right back then. I don't think you really need more than a forum and an IRC for a good place for a community to gather. I honestly have yet to find a configuration for online communities I like more than the classic forum and IRC combo.
• desireco42 14y ago
  I have to give credit to Jeff and developers here, setting this to try it out almost felt like php in terms of how easy it is to run. I wish other rails projects were this easy to try out. Oh man... :) it is a little busy interface. Let's see if this helps or gets in the way.
• ratherbefuddled 14y ago
  Please give me the option of using more than 55% of my screen width. It's 2013.
• nikcub 14y ago
  This looks great. I recently went through the decision making process with a client and they settled on getsatisfaction for now but would probably love something like this. I'd be interested to know how they came to the decision to use Rails. The goal here seems to be an application that is easy to deploy across PaaS/IaaS platforms such as AppEngine (no Ruby support atm, mentioned on the website though), AWS, Heroku as well as self hosted/installed. All the apps in this space (behind the firewall, self-installed) to date have been either PHP (Wordpress, PHPBB, SugarCRM etc.), Java (Atlassian, Jive, Zimbra) or .NET (Telligent, FogCreek, vBulletin) The only Rails app I can think of is Redmine (oh, and Diaspora). PHP is easy to deploy while a lot of businesses are already running either Java or .Net. It may be more difficult to get Rails deployed, but then again having a simple virtualization or PaaS target could change that.
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  • ben336 14y ago
    I think this pretty much sums up why Jeff isn't using php: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity... Part of the motivation for this seems to be as a way of supporting Ruby over php for ubiquitous webapps
    • codinghorror 14y ago
      Correct, I can talk about it, or I can do something about it. Be the change I want to see, and all that!
  • danneu 14y ago
    vBulletin is a PHP app. The three prevalent forum solutions are Invision, phpbb, and vB.
  • danneu 14y ago
    vBulletin is a PHP app. The three prevalent forum solutions are Invision, phpbb, and vB.
• jere 14y ago
  >Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button? We've replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Just keep scrolling down. While I like this for viewing lists of threads, I'm not sure it's a problem that needs solving within threads. Maybe it's just a symptom of my confused mind, but I actually like reading a few pages of a really long discussion, then coming back later to read more. Here I come back to the top and hell if I'm going to try to remember where I was. I no more think paging needs to go away than I think chapters in books need to go away. Or pages in books, obviously.
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    When you're logged in, we track exactly what posts you have seen. When you click on the topic again, it takes you directly to where you left off, to the post!
    • jere 14y ago
      Ok, great then!
• DannoHung 14y ago
  Multiple Categories per Thread please! PLEASE!
• rcfox 14y ago
  I guess this puts a previous post of his in context: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla... And now I fear for the future of online discussion because I expect that Jeff will succeed.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    What specifically do you fear?
    • rcfox 14y ago
      That every forum that I might want to participate in will have linear discussions and be a nightmare to follow.
• prodigal_erik 14y ago
  After http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029, I would expect this team's tools to embed values that greatly differ from mine regarding "trolls" and "bad actors" and controversy, and would be unlikely to participate without some sort of transparent oversight.
• DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  This looks great! Thank you. I wanted to try it, but because it's rails and I haven't gotten into rails, I won't. You have me for a few minutes of playing around and putting on a site somewhere but not for a multi-hour excursion into a big can of worms I'm not familiar with. I know people are ragging on you and I don't mean it like that. I just thought it was important to point out that you are deliberately raising the bar for the community. Perhaps that's a good thing! Beats me. I am not complaining, just pointing out that this choice has consequences.
• mathattack 14y ago
  I guess this answers, "What's he been up to?" Great for him! The need is real. I feel like most discussion boards I'm a part of haven't evolved much relative to the rest of the internet. Even news.ycombinator.com is a case in point.
• logical42 14y ago
  I'm personally very excited to be picking through the ember application(s). It's rather rare to find large-ish open-sourced ember codebases, so I'm pretty stoked about this. Thanks!
• martinced 14y ago
  After having pissed on Open Source for years and swearing only by Microsoft technologies / C# / SQLServer, Windows, etc., may we ask you why this time you went Ruby on Rails / PostgreSQL? Realized that 99% of the forums out there are running on LAMP stacks and "If you can't beat them, join them"? (I'm not talking about not being able to beat forum software, but about not being able to beat Open Source / Ruby / PostgreSQL / Linux) It's funny to see a die-hard Microsoftie eventually turn his jacket, especially after having defended Windows / C# / SQL Server so strongly for all these years. I'm sure people will use words like "pragmatism" or "that's what the team knew" but still... I can't help but laugh while thinking back at all these blog entires by Atwood pissing on Open Source and pissing on Linux and praising Microsofties as if they were semi-gods.
• diggan 14y ago
  The official Github-repo in case any one want to run it themselves: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/ https://github.com/discourse/discourse/ Install instructions: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.m...
• sgdesign 14y ago
  Interested to know how people think it compares to Telescope (http://telesc.pe http://telesc.pe), which is more of a traditional HN-clone social news app (also open source by the way). (I also posted in the other topic, sorry for the double post but I'm really interested in knowing what people think since both apps have similar goals)
• martinced 14y ago
  Atwood says that SO is a place for great questions and great answers. I totally disagree. SO is a place for answers (sometimes great) which are fitting the "bandwagon threshold theory" (where every technique/tool/methodology/concept too recent is considered dumb and shred to tears but once there's a sufficient number of early adopters, suddenly it becomes the one way to do things). And SO is certainly not a place for great questions. Great questions are sure to bring the ire of the mods and the relentless hate of the participants not understanding the question. Great questions require discussion, background, exchange of points of views. And only then can great answers be given to great questions. Great questions on SO are the ones with 200+ votes and are nearly always closed.
• fogus 14y ago
  I'd be happy to try it, in fact I have a site idea dying for a good forum. However, like all things new what I'd hate to have happen is to install it, get some messages flowing and then have a huge problem upgrading to the next version. He cites Wordpress, but can he make it as painless to upgrade as that?
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I want to look into this in more detail and I'm not making any judgments; it does sound interesting. However, I have never understood why Jeff hates forums so much. I visited discourse.org briefly, and I think congratulations to the team, but right now I'm not sure how this so much better than the "evil" forums. Right now, I feel like this is something that feels like a bit too much going on the site for me to get it; I certainly don't see how this trumping the horrible "b-movie" that is allegedly what forums are.
• martinced 14y ago
  Why that move? Is it a bit like professional poker players who then move on the stock market "because that's where the real big money is"? There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked... Meanwhile the big forums have daily numbers of message posted that dwarf SO so much that you'd need logarithmic scale to even see SO on the graph? So it's trying to play where the people are really hanging out? Glad to see that they heard all the criticism and realized that you couldn't go very far with a strict "no discussion" policy. Every single interesting thing ever written can be followed by a healthy discussion. Glad they figured that out.
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  • pseut 14y ago
    > There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked... I don't see this as the reason the other sites tanked at all; there are a limited number of fields where someone without much knowledge can verify whether or not they got a correct answer. Shell scripting? Hell yeah. Statistics? Not really. (I used the stats stack exchange for a little while and it immediately became clear that most of the questioners had absolutely no ability to figure out if an answer was correct, since you can't just type it on the command line and see if it worked). I don't know how much a discussion forum changes that problem.
• thingification 14y ago
  I hope it's not stating the obvious to say there's often a gap between the interests of participants, and the interests of people looking to get information from threads later on. I've found that forum moderation sometimes fragments a forum audience across "boards" to no helpful organisational end. This reduces the value of forums for the casual conversation and debate uses (as opposed to retrieval of information later on). Separately: For the participants, I think threads that discuss issue x for the hundred-and-first time are more often wanted than they are unwanted, because repetition of casual conversations is not a problem. This is despite the fact that participants often complain about such threads. The silent majority of readers presumably have a different view on it.
• asdfs 14y ago
  Was 4chan an inspiration for this? It seems much like a mix between 4chan and a more typical phpBB-style forum. It's quite similar to what 4chan would be if threads were archived forever (which is actually the case for some boards), if 4chan had user-based moderation, and if anonymity was removed.
• sytelus 14y ago
  Come to think of it... what would it take to convert HN in to a true forum/community discussion website? I love the compact, get out of the way UX without mug shots of people sprinkled all over. I love the fact even more that there is no way to post LOLCats pictures inline with text that would take away attention and occupancy unnecessary space on screen real estate (you can of course link them). It has all the necessary elements (threads, karma and so on). I think only thing we need is to be able to tag posts, search, TeX and it could be far better forum website than feature bloated Discourse.
• itistoday2 14y ago
  I ARE CONFUZZLED BY THIS WEBSITE!
• YokoZar 14y ago
  About a year ago, Jeff Atwood came to the Something Awful forums to discuss ideas for better forum software. Unfortunately, it seemed like he had already made up his mind on the design, blithely dismissing well-articulated arguments against things like gamification and having non-moderated hiding of posts. As much as I like stack overflow, I don't have high hopes for this project. I fully expect it to be even more full of the terrible metadiscussion about mod points, tags, visibility, and so on that seem to corrupt half the posts on places that implement similar systems.
  • EvilTrout 14y ago
    I think you might be surprised if you check out what we came up with. You're right that in the beginning Jeff was interested in gamification, but when we sat down and started to crack at it, we found the interface itself was in need of the most work. You can like posts in this release, but it's mainly to prevent useless "me too" posts. Users don't have scores. Posts do, but that's just so we can calculate a summary view for mega threads. Additionally, almost everything is configurable. We give what we consider sensible defaults out of the box, but you can disable/tune a lot right now. We also integrated features suggested by goons like a global API. I've been a SA goon for almost a decade. I really want to make this software good. Actually I'll probably post a follow up topic there soon!
• dspeyer 14y ago
  The threading here is completely broken. Replies are hidden unless I mouse over the post being replied to. Some of the messages are tagged with "in reply to $username" but I can't tell which of that user's posts. If I need a forum, I'll create a subreddit.
• mattquiros 14y ago
  I share their opinion on other forum software, but for god's sakes the UI is an eyesore, literally. I clicked on try, and when the home page loaded, I didn't know what to do next because everything looked clickable. I know they'll be improving on it later but I don't understand how UI was not a priority in the first release. One of the main reasons why the other forum software suck is that their UI sucks.
• eranation 14y ago
  Looks great overall, we just recently discussed how bad are open source forum options and said how nice it would be if SE would open source / sell the stackoverflow Q&A format for companies for internal forum-like discussions. So I find this to be great, much better than the alternatives, Here are a few confusing things in terms of UX though: the "New" button, expected: create a new topic, instead, took me to "You have no new topics to read." page e.g. it seems the "read new stuff" is merged with "create new stuff" (the "create new topic on the right") the "item has x replies" thingy, I understand you want to have replies in context, but this duplication confused me, e..g I wasn't sure if it's a new "type" of reply. how to solve it? well I would do one of the following: either just link (via scolling to the right location via an anchor / scroll aniumation) or keep what you have right now but also have the link so pepole can see the original comment as well So far so good, thanks for sharing this, I'm happy twice, both needed a Q&A forum at work, and also wanted to learn Ember.js (version 1)
• lhnn 14y ago
  I /really/ hope Playframework guys see this. Their "community" is a google group and "search for 'play-framework' on StackExchange!". Drives me bonkers. Hell, a reddit forum would be better! And aren't there forum/mailing list hybrid that allows people to interact through web or email? even THAT would be better!
• jacoblyles 14y ago
  Non-threaded discussions are simply broken. They visually combine multiple conversations into a linear thread. Since threaded discussions came about in the mid-2000s it is apparent that linear discussions are simply inferior. They are cacophony.
• cabalamat 14y ago
  The usability leaves something to be desired. I couldn't work out how to post a comment. There should be a button marked "post" or "send" or something. Also, comments aren't threaded. They should be, because once there arem ore than a few, a flat form makes it hard to easily tell what is a comment to what. So, while their is definitely room for better forum software, this isn't it. Personally I prefer the way my http://meowc.at/ http://meowc.at/ website does it (obviously I'm biased), even though its a lot less polished.
  • cabalamat 14y ago
    > I couldn't work out how to post a comment. There should be a button marked "post" or "send" or something. I just came back to it and a Reply button suddenly appeared. I assume this is a bug.
• dendory 14y ago
  It seems like a forum trying to focus on everything, with no real way to surface content. The result is that you end up getting lost in a sea of random topics. Also, the abundance of colourful little icons is a bit annoying.
• ashleyblackmore 14y ago
  I've been looking forward to seeing what Jeff was going to put out next. If Discourse is anywhere near as well thought-out as Stack Exchange, it could be a great success. Congrats and best of luck, Jeff!
  • DanBC 14y ago
    I agree that it's exciting, and I really hope it's successful. I like the SE model. But the great things about SE are i) strict moderation ii) limited, clear, scope iii) separated meta Some of that can be helped by the software, but most of it comes from human involvement. I'm still not sure how the new software will ease the problems that forums face. i) Web searching a problem returns a hit for a forum. I visit the forum, to see someone asking my question, and someone else saying "Search the web, noob". ii) People just love feeding trolls. It's trivially easy for trolls to disrupt forums. iii) Vested_Contributors - forums have rules. New users get punished for not following the rules; long term users have people making excuses for them ("It's Bob! Everyone knows Bob! And he makes great posts normally, so let him off this time!"). iv) Signal : Noise - and this is made worse by having limited number of posts per page. A 29 page thread, with many people saying "Wow, great!!!" is a sucky experience. Especially since most forum search software really sucks.
• varjag 14y ago
  Discourse (the name) sounds an awful lot like Disqus. Enough at least to confuse me initially.
• chmike 14y ago
  The interface is a to cluttered for me. Too much noise compared to the signal. The interface of Hacker News is much better in this respect.
• chmike 14y ago
  I don't see how trolling can be stopped. Anyone can add a reply to a new discussion and since the reply can be anything, then trolling is easy and there is no dissuasive pressure on it. What I feel is missing is the possibility to down-vote messages or something like that.
• cmbaus 14y ago
  Open Source? Well I guess it is time to get to work: http://discoursehost.com/ http://discoursehost.com/
• pacemkr 14y ago
  I've been administering a vBulletin forum for 8 years or so. Let me tell you, this is a great idea. Just yesterday, I was evaluating a bunch of forum software and came out empty handed: The OSS forum scene is just depressing, some of the more popular packages still use tables for layout. I themed a table based layout (vBulletin 3.x) once, _never_ again. The paid packages are just full of shit no-one needs. vBulletin is basically social networking software at this point. These things are so complicated only geeks, and I say that with love, can possibly figure out how to use them. It's a pissing match between competitors. However, no import (as far as I can tell) means I can't move over to Discourse. And, in your FAQ, you actually suggest that I shouldn't move. I think you underestimate how much hate I have for forum software. As a developer, Jeff, what I really want is SO self-policing features, as a service that I can use in other products. Discourse is nice and all, but I want to build something more than a forum.
• sharjeel 14y ago
  "100% free and fully open source." I can't find any link for the source code.
• sankage 14y ago
  Why use PBKDF2 instead of bcrypt for password hashing?
• leot 14y ago
  I'm at Scholarpedia, and we're looking for people to help replace MediaWiki talk pages with, basically, this. If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you, please contact support@scholarpedia.org