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Comment by whyoh | Hacker News Reader

To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.

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What don't you like about Discourse?

I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?

To give a concrete example of what others are saying and why I also really do not like discourse, the performance issues in combination with other bugs and limitations makes it extremely clunky for large threads. Go to something like [0] and try searching for a piece of text. In both Firefox and chrome, the discourse search box totally breaks for me: I can navigate to the first result, but after that future attempts to bring the search box up fail unless I go back to the original link and search again (ie remove the comment id suffix from url). The native browser search of course is not sufficient because 90% of the thread is not loaded, and the lack of proper pagination makes it hard to search with external engines. After a few months of frustration I finally learned about the hidden /print endpoint to dump the thread into a single page which helps, but still does not give me warm fuzzies about discourse.

I already prefer native browser search and proper pagination instead of loading the page on-demand, but if none of these bugs existed, I could at least tolerate the decisions. Given the bugs though, these design choices really grind my gears in a special way.

0: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/please-test-autoinstalls-for-...

Discourse is written in ruby, and it's not as performant as I would like. Discourse isn't really suitable for running on, say, a Raspberry Pi 5. It's even somewhat sluggish-feeling at times, running on a 4ish year old PC as a server (which my own org does, in a Docker container in Debian). We have a low user count, so that sluggishness seems unreasonable.

Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width...

I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums (https://danluu.com/slow-device/).

I think the best forum software right now is XenForo. But even phpBB and many similar free alternatives (MyBB, SMF,...) are better than Discourse. Those can also be heavily customized (might be true for Discourse too, but I doubt it would improve it much).

I see. Thank you for sharing! I'm not affiliated with the forum software, but I do manage a discourse instance at work and was just curious about your UX thoughts.

I appreciate the details!

I don't like infinite scrolling either, and I agree that there's a lot of wasted space in the default layout.

dont like the lack of hierarchical structure

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