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Comment by danr4 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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 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?

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 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).

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.

https://tade.link

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

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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'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 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/

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