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Discourse founder here. I tried their demo forum but it currently isn't responding. Probably too much load from HN although their home page claims they can hand

Discourse founder here. I tried their demo forum but it currently isn't responding. Probably too much load from HN although their home page claims they can handle 1k posts per second (trollface). From a cursory point of view, it seems to have more in common with Disqus than Discourse. It's embeddable, doesn't allow rich posts or markdown or our support for embedding videos, github, wikipedia, amazon, etc. It's also closed source, although it is free and they claim they'll never insert ads. I have no idea about their support for the other challenges we've faced such as infinite scrolling that is compatible with the back button. I am skeptical of redis as their only data store. We use redis too in Discourse but this would demand that all forum content can fit in memory at once, and there is a chance if a server crashes you'd lose so. Not to mention querying it is much more difficult especially when filtering. Either way, we're glad to have the competition!

courtneycouch0 14y ago
Our demo forum is in a sandbox environment separate from our primary network and it's getting traffic and loading (at least based on our logs). The production system is still pushing median API response times of 1.608ms (a drop of 0.2 since I last looked). As far as redis, we've put a great deal of effort into our redis infrastructure. We heavily shard and replicate data in such a way that memory constraints are not our biggest concern. In any case, thanks for your thoughts!
tipiirai 14y ago
Nice!! I can clearly see from your tone that we're now competitors :) As you can see, we specifically don't allow images, rich text editing or videos. We want to focus on content and the discussion. Our minimal design emphasizes this. We also think that infinite scrolling is bad UI design. We had it on our early versions but took it away. Much clearer without - you should try too! But of course, the more we differ the less we compete with each other.
- EvilTrout 14y ago
  Nothing personal, just as makers of forum software, anyone else who makes some is a competitor by definition, even if we are both free products. I'm happy to have many others in the forum space as it legitimizes our cause and pushes everything forward. Our main goal is to modernize forum software and so is yours, so we're fighting the same battle here. Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :)
  - courtneycouch0 14y ago
    Totally agreed. We were excited when you guys launched for the same reasons. Further validates the space! There simply needs to be more options, and it's great that there are people getting interested and creating products in this area.
  - hamburglar 14y ago
    > Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :) Two reasons nobody should take your UI design seriously: 1) "no way we're backing down", 2) infinite scrolling.
tipiirai 14y ago
Just realised that your infinite scrolling does not react to back button (using latest Chrome). Looking at this page: http://meta.discourse.org/latest/more http://meta.discourse.org/latest/more

courtneycouch0 14y ago

Our demo forum is in a sandbox environment separate from our primary network and it's getting traffic and loading (at least based on our logs). The production system is still pushing median API response times of 1.608ms (a drop of 0.2 since I last looked). As far as redis, we've put a great deal of effort into our redis infrastructure. We heavily shard and replicate data in such a way that memory constraints are not our biggest concern. In any case, thanks for your thoughts!

tipiirai 14y ago

Nice!! I can clearly see from your tone that we're now competitors :) As you can see, we specifically don't allow images, rich text editing or videos. We want to focus on content and the discussion. Our minimal design emphasizes this. We also think that infinite scrolling is bad UI design. We had it on our early versions but took it away. Much clearer without - you should try too! But of course, the more we differ the less we compete with each other.

EvilTrout 14y ago
Nothing personal, just as makers of forum software, anyone else who makes some is a competitor by definition, even if we are both free products. I'm happy to have many others in the forum space as it legitimizes our cause and pushes everything forward. Our main goal is to modernize forum software and so is yours, so we're fighting the same battle here. Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :)
- courtneycouch0 14y ago
  Totally agreed. We were excited when you guys launched for the same reasons. Further validates the space! There simply needs to be more options, and it's great that there are people getting interested and creating products in this area.
- hamburglar 14y ago
  > Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :) Two reasons nobody should take your UI design seriously: 1) "no way we're backing down", 2) infinite scrolling.

tipiirai 14y ago

Just realised that your infinite scrolling does not react to back button (using latest Chrome). Looking at this page: http://meta.discourse.org/latest/more http://meta.discourse.org/latest/more