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Try Discourse

try.discourse.org

30 pointszt20 comments

It has some interesting new ideas, but there's also some clutter and quite unintuitive things. Maybe I'm too used to traditional forums like phpBB and the like, but have a look at this example post:

http://try.discourse.org/t/video-games-for-pre-teens/101

1. Why does the initial question highlight and fade out? I find this distracting. It's clear that the thread starter is on top.

2. The information right below the initial post is...weird. What does it have to do with the thread?

3. "2 replies below" gets outright confusing. Why? Because you can open this dropdown-box and find posts that are listed on the same page anyways. Furthermore, it is not consistent, because the first "direct" reply is in this dropdown-box, but further down, it is NOT marked as a direct reply. The other "direct" reply however is marked as such (5th post).

4. Why does the bar right under a post have a mouseover-effect but doesn't do anything?

5. Very interesting: The collection of links that were posted throughout the entire thread. Good idea!

6. Also interesting: The participants of that thread. However, I can't see their names if I mouse-over their pictures.

Conclusion: Looks promising, but for now it has a cluttered feel to it. So, I'm not sure if I'd actually use it as a discussion forum on my website.

I agree, does too much and tries too hard with the eye candy. The old "Joel on Software" forums were the best ever, IMHO. No threads, no quoting. This works to keep the focus on the original topic rather than branching off in 12 different directions.

Without threading support though, you aren't really encouraging discussion; just a bunch of one-off comments on the original material. And even then, you end up with ad-hoc threading like you see on MetaFilter or 4Chan, where new comments address old ones by the user handle or comment id.

Discussion from the coding horror introduction post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172905

One thing that I'd love to see is more high quality forums as pluggable components instead of being / as well as being standalone apps.

For Rails specifically, we're using Forem over at Miniand which plugs in as a Rails engine and shares the same user accounts with the rest of the site via Devise. A lot of people who sign up to our forums end up converting into sales, and I believe that part of the reason is the seamless integration via the single account. Our wiki is also an engine, and also uses the same accounts, and having it all under one account system has been very much an eye opening experience.

https://github.com/radar/forem

https://www.miniand.com/forums

So, in what way does this work in which the forum software we are used to doesn't? I think that's a rather bold claim. Between customization and skins, you could also say forums have been more or less perfected 10 years ago, instead of saying "they haven't changed" ^^

If you say "this works" and therefore imply other things don't, that's just asking for criticism; so I'd much rather hear why you like this more than, say, phpBB, in the least fluffy language possible, instead of telling me why normal forums are broken and this is "obviously" what I need. While I could give you a long list of things I would see improved in forums in general, this thing doesn't have much if any of them, and is even going backwards in some areas, in my books.

I'm not a designer but I wonder if a little more whitespace could give the already attractive look an even more professional, refined appearance?

Here's what the individual-thread pages look like with 20px margin-bottom added: http://imgur.com/YLbXOVg

Also, what's the design philosophy behind the button-like category labels, seen on each forum page and on the categories listing: http://try.discourse.org/categories

Besides the conflict with the action-type buttons (e.g. "Login"), the color of the labels almost get lost when juxtaposed to the jumble of colorful admin avatars (I assume the users in the headers are the forum admins). It seems like plain, black text would make the categories stand out more.

Otherwise, seems like a solid product, even without knowing everything all the details under the hood. Hopefully this will be a strong alternative for publishers who don't want to cede control to Disqus/Facebook.

It is a little too grand in its claims. There have been good alternatives for years to things like phpBB, etc. I've been using Vanilla for my product's support forums and it is fine.

I do like seeing people try new approaches though. Even if a little less grandeur in the claims is needed.

My friends said it look like a crazy spreadsheet.

After taking a good look, yes, there are a couple of useless information in the main layout, I would strip one column or two.

I am really excited about this. I have run a forum for going on 12 years now, first on Vbulletin and now Invision.

I don't even use the forum anymore because it is so painful. It's a pain to maintain, to use and run. I have always wanted to do some engineering against new forum paradigms (and did hack some up) but didn't follow through.

At this point I would try anything that breaks the stale paradigm and especially if I can host on a paas

Why has the original HN post with 629 points disappeared? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172905

edit: oh wait, its on the front page again now

There's actually a lot of forum software that works quite well.

I like the name though.

> Topic Not Found > Sorry, we couldn't find that topic. Perhaps it has been deleted? > Back to Topic List

Shows that for every topic for me... That's rather ironic...

It gets reset at least once a day, maybe you visited it just when that had happened.

I wonder what the tech stack is. At the one company I'm involved with that made it big, typical forums are just not scalable enough. Even the typical CMS we had is floored by the number of users. These things are just not, generally, written to scale. They perform dozens of DB calls per page, run into locking issues, can't handle enormous user tables, etc..

It's open source. https://github.com/discourse/discourse

    Discourse implements a variety of open source tech. You may wish to familiarize yourself with the various components that Discourse is built on, in order to be an effective contributor:

    Languages/Frameworks

    Ruby on Rails - Our back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully and responds in JSON.
    Ember.js - Our front end interface is an Ember.js app that communicates with the Rails API.
    Databases

    PostgreSQL - Our main data store is Postgres.
    Redis - We use Redis for our job queue, rate limiting, as a cache and for transient data.

Ah, Rails and PostreSQL. That's unfortunate. They have a reputation for not scaling well compared to more modern technologies like NodeJS and MongoDB.

trololol?

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