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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

Discourse is so heavy and error-prone for the simple task it executes that I imagine anyone wanting to run it reliably must hire the Discourse team for a ton of money.

So probably what this article is saying is that the key to make money is to build yourself a name, then use it to sell crappy software and sell the support.

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I had a lot of trouble keeping Discourse running on my own. There are a lot of moving parts and a ton of configuration to keep track of. Making changes or even updating the instance were tasks I dreaded because of the likelihood something would break. It requires a lot of system resources. I like Docker a lot in many situations, but with Discourse it only seemed to reduce visibility into the problems I was having.

I have to say the folks on meta.discourse were helpful though.

In the end, the users decided—I ended up integrating a Mailman 3 server with the website, and we're in the process of switching over to it. The users preferred the simplicity of LISTSERV-style mailing lists over a web forum. This probably would've happened no matter the choice of forum software, but I can't help but think Discourse's unpleasant UX played a part in them reaching that consensus.

Interesting. I was able to get Discourse running ... on heroku no less, and I haven't had to futz with it in the months since. It just hums along on its own, but then again I'm a pretty experienced Ruby/rails engineer.

You must have a fairly techie and older audience. I have to say as harsh as I've been on Discourse in this thread, I'd still take it over listserv.

Yes, academics who (generally) started their careers in the 1990s and are used to listserv-style communication. They kept wanting to interact with Discourse through email, but it wasn't the experience they were looking for.

I have a Discourse forum that I run on my own, and it has been a fairly pleasant experience overall. Initial installation was a bit problematic because of a bug that they have that doesn't properly handle # in mail server password (https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-app-yml-doesnt-like-e...) - it so happened that my mail password was auto-generated, and did contain that symbol in it. But other than that, it all went pretty smooth.

I've done a few updates, and it was all entirely via the web interface, with a single click on "Update" button and watching it do its thing. Zero issues so far.

I'm not sure what you mean by "ton of configuration". It seems like most things just worked the way they were set up out of the box. I keep fiddling with various user- and posting-related settings, but that's mostly out of curiosity more than any kind of need.

We have hundreds of live Discourse sites running the $10/month self supported Digital Ocean (or whatever cloud you like) version for literally years without any issue at all: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INST...

I used to do all these installs for people by hand, and personally support them to ensure that we had indeed built something that was easy to support long term. I stopped doing this after a few years because I knew we had.

It's probably part of the choosen language and framework, and certainly helps sales that it's not so easy to get it running.

It's certainly not as simple to get started as with Nodejs npm or LAMP stack. But there are already easy to install discourse forum clones that use Node.js or PHP as backend language (use Google to find them).

Edit:

two of several clones that run on Node or LAMP stack (I am not related to any of them)

Nodejs: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB

PHP: https://github.com/flarum/core

Yeah, I know the web hosting landscape has changed since WordPress took off, but if the goal of Discourse was to be the WordPress of forums, using Ruby and Postgres instead of PHP/MySQL seems like a big misstep.

Well also, they seem to have a weird idea of what "modernizing" a web app means. While it's true that traditional web forums have plenty of usability issues, I don't really think Discourse actually solves them. It just hides them with fancier ones IMO.

As was having the system not well suited to running on shared hosting accounts. That's because (for good or bad) the vast majority of websites are hosted on fairly cheap shared hosting accounts on large webhosts, where access to the server is heavily restricted and language choices are often limited to PHP/MySQL.

WordPress (and most traditional forum scripts like phpBB) work fine in these situations. Just upload a few files, set up a database and run the installer to get the thing working.

Discourse doesn't. It also generally isn't integrated into one click install software like Softaculous or Fantastico. This means that the audience using a typical shared host like Hostgator and clicking a button in their CPanel to set up their site can't easily use Discourse like they could WordPress.

So yeah, that's an issue here too. Discourse just requires too much control over your server for most shared hosting accounts and can't easily be integrated into one click install setups/setup by merely uploading a bunch of files. So the mass market won't ever touch it.

I think vps is the new web host. We have products like cloudron, yunohost coming up to serve that market.

When Jeff Atwoord originally announced Discourse he claimed his biggest goal was to kill off PHP for good, and he wrote Discourse in Ruby specifically to convince everyone else to move off of the "one true holdout" that PHP still dominated... online forums.

I'm honestly not a huge fan of Jeff Atwoods, and that started long before he started SO. To me it just feels like he's a bit too idealistic in his approach to things.

Funny that he would say that. Co spidering the fact that a huge majority of ALL web based open source software seems to be PHP even today.

Flarum is not ready for production yet, and using NodeJS is far from the cheap stack of LAMP.

Also, id like to hear what's the reasoning behind using MongoDB for a forum. I mean, I'm just learning this stuff but a forum seems to be a perfect case for a relational DB.

I don't know about "perfect", it certainly can fit the relational mold though.

I'll take a shot in the dark and say that the advantage of using a NoSQL platform to host a forum is that you can very quickly load all resources relating to a post by storing them in one database document.

That does mean you probably need to polyfill certain functionality, but the traditional case for NoSQL is made by saying a blog can load a given post's comments, media, etc. with one query. Forums are a similar animal.

Mmm, but then, why not use NoSQL for everything? I say again, I'm just a beginner into programming but it seems that PostgreSQL would require a shitload of work to really go slow. Also in forums you know your data schema, nothing will change in terms of what data you need.

It's true traditional databases require you to think through your solution before you go implementing it, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

NoSQL is great for prototyping and being productive fast, but that productivity comes with a lot of pitfalls. Pitfalls by the way that many devs have been blissfully ignorant of for decades because they have been insulated from them by normalized relational databases.

Unless you are experienced with/aware of those pitfalls, I would almost make a blanket statement that a traditional SQL database should be the default solution for the backend until you can explain why NoSQL is a better fit for a given project.

Also, what makes you think PostgreSQL is slow? What is "slow" to you?

Thank you for the explanation. And I meant just the opposite with postgresql. I use it as a sort of data warehouse with a lot of work in a really modest VPS and it works perfectly.

But when has this actually been a problem to solve? I've been a regular on tens, maybe a hundred forums over the last 20 years. The vast majority of them don't have performance issues.

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