There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1]
[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.
They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.
In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.
Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using infinite scroll just sucks.
I've also visited some forums recently that do not use discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse invokes.
For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.
I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.
The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.
It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.
I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.
Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.
They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.
Optimizing responses has diminishing returns once you're below 100ms, but 250ms is far too slow.
For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is moot because you're going to end up with a large amount of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway regardless of how you initially spawn them.
I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.
I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/
Vs these, orders of magnitude more users, multiple orders of magnitude more posts
https://www.forumrankings.net/
Also
PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/
You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.
Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.
It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.
Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking to be reliable.
Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.
Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.
[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...
The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.
Yes, it’s awful.
> Check it out e.g.
Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.
How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.
Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?
Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.
So far we're hitting that goal.
It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.