Reference: Discourse and Flarum

[rme]

Hi,

I only want to point out that this forum software has to be better than this two new forums that are been developed, you can take some ideas from them too.


FLARUM

Website: http://flarum.org
Github: https://github.com/flarum/core
Language: PHP
Demo: not available













DISCOURSE

Website: http://www.discourse.org/
Github: https://github.com/discourse/discourse
Language: Ruby
Demo: https://meta.discourse.org/

[1715369951]

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[1715369951]

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[DizzyDragon]

Really hoping the interface isn't going to look the same as those two my favorite forum turned into using the discourse software and i had to quit using it really I think it's horrible considering its suppose to be the revolution of forum software.

[theymos]

Really hoping the interface isn't going to look the same as those two my favorite forum turned into using the discourse software and i had to quit using it really I think it's horrible considering its suppose to be the revolution of forum software.

I agree. Discourse seems clunky and very sparse in features. I never used it for a long period of time, though. What things did you find most annoying? Was it just the fact that you lost 80% of your previous forum software's features?

There's something about the UIs of a lot of modern websites that I don't like. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, though. Too much wasted space, maybe? Not enough info on each page?

[taesup]

1.) Flarum seems to be a student's project that hasn't reached a fully useable state yet. Although we're not fully done with our current forum software, we have gotten a bit farther than their current code base.

2.) Jeff Atwood is one of my heros so I can't really complain about the quality of discourse but I do believe it was written with the idea of replacing the comment system for blogs first. The idea of being a stand alone forum came second so as a forum user, you tend to lose a lot of the features and the UI isn't made with that in mind.

Honestly, the closest forum that can compete with what we're going for is probably nodeBB. We have a lot of catching up to do to be as feature complete as they are. We're already ahead in some aspects.

[Cøbra]

The developer of Flarum also created the esoTalk forum software.  Demo can be found here http://esotalk.org/forum.  It just looks like old school forum software though, but with a more minimal and modern design.  You can style SMF and produce something similar.  Nothing revolutionary there.  Discourse seems more innovative and at least attempts to create a new type of forum "experience".

I think what makes innovating with new forum software so challenging is all the people that got used to older software.  Those old forum software all have a similar way of organizing information.  Anything that tries to do something unique is met with an initial "WTF?" type response from people that spent a lot of time on software like SMF or vBulletin.  New forum software for the most part seems to want to just behave exactly like the old stuff.  FluxBB is one such software that I had high hopes for, but there hasn't been much innovation here either (demo http://fluxbb.org/forums/index.php).

One of these persistent forum behaviors is how sections are presented.  Forum software almost always presents all of the available forum sections to you once you join.  Unless the site is very specific and niche, you won't care about most of these sections.  I don't care about the local, altcoin, and trading sections on here.  If you want to fix this, you are expected to poke around in settings.  The software expects you to clean up the mess it created.  An opt-in model would be a better experience.  When users join they automatically opt-in (or "follow") the Meta and Bitcoin Discussion sections (+ their local section if detected that this is needed), but they can optionally follow more sections, or decide to temporarily have the entire forum be visible to find new sections to follow.  There can be support for user created & moderated sections.  Users can pay the forum a monthly fee or a one time payment for the privilege of having their own section to interact with their customers, or other bitcoiners that share similar hobbies.  Such an arrangement seems very much in the spirit of decentralization.

[ragnarock]

I think that Flarum is really innovating with the design and the way that they want to make forums minimalistic and focus in a great user experience. instead of bloat it with a lot of features, they want to make it simple a onle add relevant thing to the core and any other stuff will be an extention.

Discourse already has more feautures, but it is built with Ruby, so I can't use it in a shared hosting.

[nihilnegativum]

I really hate the minimalist approach, why does everything have to be a white clean surface.