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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I prefer it over every forum I’ve used, especially on mobile.

One of the design goals of Discourse was that it should work well on mobile phones. I guess most other forum software is either from the time of before widespread smartphone use or it doesn't consider mobile users. With that being said, I actually don't like discourse's UI and prefer more classical forums like PHPbb.

Working well on crappy toy devices = working shittily on actual computers

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.

Discourse goes a bit overboard with the javascript and all the bells and whistles but I don't understand how anybody could prefer PHPbb over it, other than familiarity. That being said I always found PHPbb abysmal to use, even in the early 2000, so clearly I'm biased.

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.

> even in the early 2000

Those signatures loaded with images and longer than actual content were pretty bad.

You could turn them off, you know.

Yes, 20 years ago we were able to customize software for use. Mindblowing, I know.

The first 5 words of your comment were highly relevant. The rest is snark. This is HN - please don't contribute to its enshittification.

Go blame the software industry for throwing away what made software of yesteryear so amazing to use. I'm just a simple farmer tending to his memes.

Ever tried flarum? It's my preferred option in the "modern" forum realm, still pretty lightweight (even degrades gracefully without js).

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