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Welcome to the brand new Erlang Forums

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Good that they're getting their own self-hosted forum.

I don't like all the centralization happening and reddit becoming the forum for everything.

i hate constant annoyances/nagging by discourse forums

forum is a place for discussion, not a RPG where you collect achievements

I dislike the endless scrolling. It's a constant source of frustration when you think you have now almost approached the end of a discussion only to discover it goes on and on ...

Pretty slow render times. Is this using Phx?

it's https://www.discourse.org/

Businesses that call themselves ".org" are disgusting.

It is 100% open source and free.

Doesn't work without JS.

I shared your disappointment at first, but it does look like you can at least browse on desktop without JS. I haven't tried signing up or posting. Mobile seems to be broken without JS unless you pretend to be a computer.

I'm on desktop, using Firefox, and it's just an empty page with a red border at the top for me.

It's 2021, who the heck is still disabling JS

I only started to disable JS in 2021, lol. Running arbitrary scripts from random sites on the Internet is not a good idea as there are many privacy and security risks. Browsing with JS disabled by default actually works pretty well, most of the sites are more or less readable. Of course if I was using Erlang and interested in this forum, I'd enable JS on it because it's probably fine (and open source?), but it's still disappointing that a programming forum is not at all readable without JS.

Yeah that's a great idea, in this day and age where everyone is concerned about security, disabling JS and making sites work without JS seems like a great approach.

Hopefully the giants that are always espousing security will see the light.

I've had JS disabled for arbitrary sites since 2019 (with some necessary exceptions), the only thing I feel I've lost out on is being able to view Twitter (as of last year I think?) and Imgur links. In general my experience has been that browsing the internet is faster and more secure without it.

>the only thing I feel I've lost out on is being able to view Twitter

I use Nitter https://nitter.net/

How do you pay for your e-commerce goods online?

Off-topic: Did discourse "win" forums?

Because I absolutely hate it's UX. 95% of the times I stumble on a Discourse forum I immediately close the tab.

I miss old-school paginated, hierarchical forums. It's kinda like old vs new reddit.

I recently looked at forum software for a community I was trying to set up and it felt like it's either stuck in the past or went too far with shiny web stuff (like discourse).

Just wanted a middle ground - oldschool style just less cluttered and less unnecessary info. Did I miss something? Did no one figure it out?

I'm designing a forum system like you want but it's still a while away.

sure! find my email in my profile and message me when you've got something. good luck!

> I miss old-school paginated, hierarchical forums

I miss old-school mailing lists where I can read and write to them with whatever client I want.

I dont miss that I could not edit my post after sending it.

You can definitely use Discourse in "mailing list mode" and use your e-mail client.

It did for programming languages. OCaml's forums and Elixir's forums use it too. I personally don't like it very much, but like you, I don't know of a good middle ground.

As someone who maintains 5 different discourse communities, the #1 reason is ease of installation and maintenance.

It was hands-down the easiest to install, and is the easiest to maintain. Self-hosting on Linode or Digital Ocean is cheap and easy.

If you set it up right, it can act like an e-mail listserv as well. I have one instance where we migrated an old e-mail only community over to a private discourse (need to login before seeing any content). About half of the users just use e-mail to interact with discourse, including replying to threads, etc.

I am the opposite. I really like Discourse's UX! I dislike paginated, hierarchical forums. So, as you can see, taste differs from people to people.

I think Discourse and NodeBB are winning for now, yes.

I don't like to hate on products, but I fully agree. Discourse is absolutely unusable to me.

I've tried several times, but I cannot get it to show me a view that is useful. IE, what's new. Instead I get some algorithm that is determining hotness, which doesn't seem to ever change.

I've tried the mailing list mode, and a forum that I thought was dead was absolutely too much chatter for email. I tried the web interface again and was lost again.

The fact that many projects and people I respect choose discourse implies to me that I'm the one who is missing something. But maybe it's a collective mirage.

I run https://forum.open-services.net/ and "Latest" is the default option. You actually have to explicitly click "Top" to "get some algorithm that is determining hotness". As an admin, I can show you the Top view but the default in Discourse is Latest, just as you'd expect.

Pagination: yes, it's not the best but you can click and drag the slider on the right: https://forum.open-services.net/t/introduce-yourself/21/7 (the one that says 7/31). The (bookmarkable) URL will change when you release that slider. You can also click on "Aug 2017" which is a sort of the first page and "26d ago" that brings you to the last "page"

Mailing list mode: I recommend to use a weekly activity digest (Under /u/YourUsernameHere/preferences/emails) and under favorite categories you select "Watching First Post" (under the bell icon in the top right).

But no, you are not missing anything. Most of forum systems come with notification dials set to the max that you need to dial back a bit.

> I've tried several times, but I cannot get it to show me a view that is useful. IE, what's new.

That's odd. This is definitely something it can do, and in my experience it is the default view or at least easily available. E.g., the front page of llllllll.co is just that.

> Instead I get some algorithm that is determining hotness, which doesn't seem to ever change.

Perhaps the Discourse forum you visited had Top as the default view? Usually it's Latest which is the topics which most recently had a reply. When you create an account on the forum you should have the New and Unread views available as well, which are tailored to your user account.

Related: can anyone explain why the .forum TLD is like $1000? There is some circular nonsense out there that it's to "make up for low numbers".

So they can print money

On the bright side I find Discourse's email interface fairly good.

The downside is that they auto-subscribe me to weekly emails when I sign up (which is illegal in a lot of places!). I think this can be changed away from the default by the instance owner but like most default settings it usually isn't changed.

What about Flarum (https://flarum.org) or Forem (https://forem.dev)?

I tried to set up Flarum, but soon realized it's just another Discourse with an extensive plugin system.

There was even an attempt at "forum hierarchy plugin" for that oldschool style but it was soon abandoned.

Forem is similar in the lack of hierarchies. Focuses too much on the now.

Have you checked out https://flarum.org/

It looks like a reskin of discourse, not "old-school" at all. The UI is nearly identical, from the circle avatars to the minimal separation between items to the infini-scroll threads with identical draggable timelines on the right.

https://tade.link

AGPL, no js required, accessible, has mailing list and nntp interfaces

https://github.com/epilys/sic/

I agree. I don't think anyone has gotten it right yet. There's something about Discourse that makes the messages feel transient, and I find unpleasant for an internet forum.

I'm glad an option exists that modern users find at least palatable if the alternative is _no_ internet forums. It would be far worse if all we had were Discord communities. At least Discourse is less transient than that.

Still an opportunity here I think. The feeling of persistence that classic internet forums (phpBB, xenForo, etc.) give us with modern quality-of-life features is a software I dream about building.

> There's something about Discourse that makes the messages feel transient, and I find unpleasant for an internet forum.

Wow, I've always been put off by Discourse forums and wasn't sure what the reason was. That's it!

Maybe it's the way they use tags to store/structure things rather than the folder structure used by other forum software.

Have you seen https://forum.dlang.org/ ?

It appears to be a perfectly integrated web forum / NNTP / mailing list system.

you really hit the nail with the transient comment. Feels like the whole UX discourages longevity for "hotness".

Edit: re. the opportunity, in the spirit of times - maybe what's missing is a "headless" forum framework with a byoFE?

You'd expect something like Discourse to be heavily reliant on javascript, as the rest of the modern web is (no javascript means less data on visitors so lower value on your company) but it's totally the opposite. Not only does Discourse work well without javascript, it is actually usable.

I no longer close my tabs when I see Discourse, I just tap uBlock and the "</>" button. It may not have as many bells and whistles of the PHP forums of yore, but it works as is quite easy to use. My deepest thanks to the good hearted soul inside Discourse who in my imagination fought tirelessly for that to happen.

Weird, I really like discourse and their forums. I find, search and cross sharing between discourse forums quite nice. they strike a good balance on desktop and mobile, its easy to catch up on what I haven't read, etc.

My only beef with discourse is that it's pretty complex to install for what ought to be a web-app backed by a database. Judging from the traces of information scattered around the Internet (the official docs seem very mum on the issue, or maybe my Googling skills are poor), it seems like it expects all web servers to have access to a shared NFS drive, but I can't quite tell.

I don't mind the UI. I have nostalgia for old school forums (I used to operate one back around 2008-2012), but I'm happy enough with discourse.

I found it the easy to install, especially on a $5 Linode or Digital Ocean VM, using the docker install.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

I'm trying to deploy to Kubernetes. I'm sure manual installation steps on a single VM instance are easy enough, but I guess my standards are a bit higher: HA and reproducibility at a minimum. And maybe the volume(s) don't need to be shared across instances and I'm misreading--it's hard to tell.

I know a guy who runs a pretty neat old school forum for us. I think he sells the service if you wanna have a look.

https://forum.catto5k.com/features/

I call designs like Discourse’ the duploification of the web. Everything is twice as big as it needs to be so it’s “easier” to use.

Easier in quotes because it is actually a lot more difficult (for me). The excess white space and lack of differentiation between bits of content just make it harder to follow conversations. I might have brain problems, I dunno, but I struggle with it in any case.

But what I dislike more is companies and projects abandoning GitHub issues for Discourse forums. The disconnect between source and issue is frustrating as someone that files a fair number of detailed issues. Issues that, btw, require enough information that I end up using GitHub anyway (gists).

> Just wanted a middle ground - oldschool style just less cluttered and less unnecessary info. Did I miss something? Did no one figure it out?

I'd say WoltLab Suite (https://www.woltlab.com/en/) matches that description. The forum part of the software is not free/OSS, though. There is also other modern, commercial, PHP-based forum software that would match your description (XenForo).

Disclosure: WoltLab is my employer.

I sometimes think it isn't that I want old-school paginated, hierarchical forums. It is that Discourse's graphics, layout are badly designed. There are quite a few non paginated, JS front end forums which I enjoy. They dont have similar problem as Discourse.

I think this problem has been raised a few times. But the response was theme it the way you like. Discourse is flexible. I generally dont think this is a good argument because most people just use it the way by default.

Really wish they hire some design guy to work on it.

Knew this would use Discourse before clicking. To a first approximation I think every official language web forum I've visited in recent years has been. And it works well too!

I believe it’s being done by the Elixir Forum folks (who use Discourse).

I've always wondered why more crypto projects aren't using Erlang seeing as it's so good at distributed systems

Amoveo is one, it's mostly interesting for other reasons though.

Yep, have wondered that myself

By all means not a erlang expert, just read an intro book on it and it mentioned that erlang was not a good heavy computation language, so maybe that's why?

Ah this makes sense, I haven't used Erlang so didn't know that. Thanks!

Because a programming language providing great async/distributed capabilities is very different from a distributed system.

what do you mean by "why more"? you can always have more. are there not enough for you at the moment?

I don't know of any, but even if there are a few, I'm unsure why it lost to Go/Rust/C++

Erlang/Elixir is great for sure, but it's very slow at computations so if you're talking about more lower-level projects that will directly verify or do calculations on the blockchain, then that's a showstopper. (If you don't let something like Rust handle that, but then you might not get that much benefit compared to writing it all in Rust.)

Erlang is great for non-blocking concurrency, but for CPU-bound tasks it’s not the fastest language out there.

https://aeternity.com

    æternity blockchain is an Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform engineered by programming pioneers to address some of the most fundamental challenges native to earlier blockchains. By redesigning blockchain technology at the protocol level, the æternity developer community has enabled the core protocol to understand and integrate a rich set of functionalities out of the box.

Erlang and Elixir are not good at number crunching tasks like crypto mining.

Please: https://flarum.org/

“Forums”? Is it 2003? Why not a newsgroup or nice Telnet server where people can chat? Such a weird thing to hear the term “new” and “forum” together.

"New" refers to this particular Erlang-focused instance of a forum.

But I'm curious-- given that you seem to consider online web-based fora to be outmoded & anachronistic-- what in your mind would be representative of the new hotness?

Forums work well.

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