I disagree. I find Discourse superb. From the user’s perspective it is simple, clean, fast, with amazing search, etc. It can be customised, but most people using it do it for practical reasons, and worry little about customisations.
- not hijack my scroll or do that infinite page thing. Please load the entire thread or at least let me use classical pagination.
- not hijack CTRL-f for its own built-in search. I want my browser's on page search, and I know what I'm doing.
Just in case you(or others) don't know, you can press Ctr-F twice to get the native browser page search.
I experience it as very slow and bloated, even though it somewhat improved.
Still, compared to a good email client, it’s not so fast. Which is why I personally read Discourse forums mainly via email, only visiting the actual site for long threads or when I want to reply. It’s not perfect, since Discourse allows editing posts but doesn’t notify email users of edits. But it’s fine. I actually like it better than real mailing lists, because I prefer Discourse’s composing interface.
Discourse is definitely not fast. Whenever Google sends me to a discourse page I just end up giving up on waiting for it after staring for over 8 seconds at a blank page.