I wish people stopped using discourse.
Sending pictures of pieces of hand written paper over email would be a more user friendly and usable interface than this javascript mess.
Sending pictures of pieces of hand written paper over email would be a more user friendly and usable interface than this javascript mess.
Discourse is one of the nicest to use forum platforms. Works on phones, has normal notifications, proper markdown, nice mention-subscription-quote system, nice plugins (such as abbreviation explainer) and it's not an eyesore.
Source: Was on the team (but not the decision-maker) to replace a very large legacy forum with Discourse.
For reference, me saying that emailing around pictures of handwritten text would be preferable to discourse was not an endorsement of mailing around pictures of handwritten text.
Also, as a side note, mailing list deliverability sucks because mailing list maintainers are sometimes stuck in the past and think that impersonating users while modifying messages is a good idea.
All the well ran mailing lists either don't modify messages and instead add unsubscribe headers and pass things on, or modify the messages as well as the from email addresses to avoid falling afoul of DKIM and therefore causing deliverability problems due to DMARC rejections.
HTML emails are also an abomination for replying so I am not sure what your point is there. There's basically one standard for in-line replies for plain text emails but there is no agreement on how to in-line reply to HTML emails.
But I can see how someone might dislike emails and don't think its the right solution for forums. That being said, they're still better than discourse.
List of advantages over discourse:
- Don't need a modern PC or phone to render all the javascript
- There's no mandatory (or any) javascript
- My keyboard isn't hijacked for the purposes of implementing an input scheme which doesn't match the rest of my browsing experience and therefore requires me to re-learn how to use my web browser when I go on the website
- I archive the content easily, index it myself and search through it at my leisure
- The UI is as simple as I want it to be
Forum websites should not require javascript for rendering, or even ideally posting, it was never needed it in the past and I never felt like adding javascript added anything to the user experience. It should be simple, secure, easily searchable and above all else shouldn't hijack your keyboard.
My main issue with Discourse is that I prefer HN/Reddit-like threading for replies rather than linear comments, but PHPbb does the same and there are pros and cons for both formats anyway.
Those signatures loaded with images and longer than actual content were pretty bad.
Yes, 20 years ago we were able to customize software for use. Mindblowing, I know.
Smart watches should have taken off, so everything could have been made post stamp-sized to work well on them and become completely unusable on a screen larger than your hand.
This is a frustrating web experience for anyone who uses any custom bindings in a browser and it repeats itself every time I use one of these websites.
Lastly, I have no idea why forum software needs absolutely any javascript to just render a basic page. Discourse renders as a blank page with javascript disabled, that's just extremely unnecessary.
We really need a user agent that actually acts in the interest of the user.
Now, try to do encourage that behavior in a corporate environment, and you'll just get blank stares.
But to name a couple of points: itʼs index-able by search engines (compared to a certain similarly named popular “alternative”); robust topic tracking system: I know exactly where I left each topic off.