Discourse Forum System (Ruby)

[Mister_K]

What is forum software?

To us, forum software is a group of people interested in a common topic who are willing to type paragraphs to each other on a web page.
Yes, there is Twitter for very short form, there is web chat and IRC for real time with limited persistence, there is Tumblr for micro-blogging, and there are blogs for, well, blogging. But we believe forums are a fundamental building block of web community.
Here's a screenshot of a forum as it existed in the year 2000, alongside a screenshot of the same forum as it exists today.


http://try.discourse.org/

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To me it seems stylish but it over-simplifies forum platforms and it isn't exactly very tidy. The current forum structure of the popular forums such as IPB, XenForo, phpBB, vBulletin isn't amazing but it works just fine. At the end of the day, it depends on the Web Development Team to create a modernized forum based on these Platforms.

Is there a big future to 'Discourse' and could it pose a ''large threat" to the above forum solutions? Mind you, it does require a VPS and Shared Hosting will simply not be sufficient to run this. What are your thoughts on this?

Would Techspot possibly take on this forum software?

(my whole stance on this is neutral, for now, It seems il be sticking to phpBB on my website until 'Discourse' ''improves'').

 

[cliffordcooley]

Would Techspot possibly take on this forum software?

(my whole stance on this is neutral, for now, It seems il be sticking to phpBB on my website until 'Discourse' ''improves'').

TechSpot just migrated to XenForo from VBulletin several months back. They have been working hard on weeding out all the little glitches from the transition. I think it is safe to say they are not interested in changing forum software again so quickly.

 

[DelJo63]

Hmm; My Dell Inspiron features a 15.6" screen is nice, but I hate fullscreen widows that hide the desktop. My sole discontent re TS is how wide the screen needs to be to get all three columns under Forums:
Forum Title, Last Post Subject and then the Recent, New, Pop summary.
Lots of wasted white space and font sizes for a 90-year-old.

As to Discourse, lots of eye candy but imo, not impressive

 

[Julio Franco]

Indeed, our long-term bet was made on Xenforo a year ago. They are not sitting duck and a lot of interesting stuff is coming up on the next major release that I hope we'll jump on shortly after release:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/even-more-new-stuff.51344/

 

[Mister_K]

I wouldn't think you guys would hop over to it anyway, did see a post about XenForo few rows below this one.

I do agree Jobeard, the large font spaces and wasted white space do make it rather pale, although do add to the splicity. That said, for Tech forums, simplicity is not the main focus since most know how to operate around forums.

XenForo looks interesting, I am still running phpBB and at times it is a nightmare to run, specially for someone like me whos programming skills are, well appalling

As said before, most features in Discourse can be added to any forums with modifications. The higher resource margin for Discourse turns poorer consumers who aren't able to pay for anything more then Shared Hosting off the product which won't really help those guys over at Discourse.

 

[Andrea Borman]

Yes a lot of forum admins seem to be switching to XenForo. I tried out the Demo myself and found it easy to use.
Windows 7 Forums.com has also changed their forum software over to XenForo.

I was reading on some threads on other forums if V Bulletin is less secure, some people have mixed views about that. Though when I tried the free demo of V Bulletin I found it quite hard to use, not very user friendly. The free forum software's are Phpbb but the themes are not so nice.

 

[cliffordcooley]

The free forum software's are Phpbb but the themes are not so nice.

You mean free themes, they have nice themes that can be purchased.

 

[Mister_K]

Yes a lot of forum admins seem to be switching to XenForo. I tried out the Demo myself and found it easy to use.
Windows 7 Forums.com has also changed their forum software over to XenForo.

I was reading on some threads on other forums if V Bulletin is less secure, some people have mixed views about that. Though when I tried the free demo of V Bulletin I found it quite hard to use, not very user friendly. The free forum software's are Phpbb but the themes are not so nice.

If you have a designer and a coder you can make your phpBB platform really user friendly, you won't even be able to tell it's phpBB unless you look through the code.

I have designed a theme for my board but my coding background stinks ^^