Next-generation forum software; Discourse

[Evropi]

I thought this is a better fit for off-topic, as it is so new that is lacks import wizards. It is still somewhat rough around the edges, though the UI has been finalised.

I present to you the future of the web forum:
Discourse

Discourse is a product by famous programmer (whom I respect a lot) Jeff Attwood. It is open source, written in Ruby on Rails (at last, a good Ruby forum!) and a JS framework. Most importantly; it's innovative.

The web forum has not changed much in, ooh, make that 10 years or so? At least.

vBulletin 1.x, the cutting edge of forum software 10 years ago.

The same forum today! Not the latest vBulletin, but tell you what - it really hasn't changed at all!

This is a problem.

It is not easy to become a member of a forum. Bloated software like phpBB confuses users. I know a lot of people who can't get the hang of something as simple as displaying links as text in BBCode in a number of forums. The User Experience (UX) of a web forum has not developed at all as UX's have improved in all areas of technology.

Discourse solves this problem.



I won't say anything more; go to the website and click 'Try it'. I admit, I was sceptical at first, but I quickly realised (especially after making an account on their 'meta' page) how powerful and revolutionary this is. Browsing quickly through the forum for the latest posts has never been so easy. Neither has editing. Discourse, I can firmly say, it the future of online non-real time communication.

It feels great to know that this is open source and written largely in one of the nicest programming languages (and frameworks) there is, using the brilliant (and open source) PostgreSQL database.

Without further ado, I can only recommend you try Discourse now or join in the conversation. You can also contribute to their code and art (smileys, etc) repository on GitHub if you have the skill.

Thanks for reading.

[charlie]

Very pretty.

[qubodup]

Vanilla is nice too.

http://vanillaforums.org/docs/toc

I'm afraid 2.0 forums might be even less suitable for isolated subforums like our hosted project forums.

[Dread Knight]

Looks pretty good! Thanks for poking me on IRC about it.
I've been waiting for a forum that allows for OAuth 2.0 (google/facebook/twitter) out of the box, since I consider that feature is really important nowadays since a lot of people don't want to register *yet another user* that they might forget about completely later on.
Was expecting Disqus commenting system http://disqus.com to provide such a forum already, as it's very popular and I'm making good use of it.

[Evropi]

Vanilla is nice too.

http://vanillaforums.org/docs/toc

I'm afraid 2.0 forums might be even less suitable for isolated subforums like our hosted project forums.

I've tried Vanilla and... it's not as good. It looks, at least, really basic, and transitions from topic to topic are not seamless (thanks to JS usage in Discourse, they are). Amongst many other things. See here for an example Vanilla forum. They can, of course, be customised (as seen here) but they always seem to look really basic and ugly. I'd say Vanilla is Forum 1.5 by cutting out useless cruft like MyBB's infamous calendar. XenForo (proprietary) is a bit like this too, but is again not quite as revolutionary.

That is indeed an issue qubodup, and it will be worked on. One of the concepts is a sub-reddit like 'thing' though the concept is far from final (details with mockups here).

Of course, there isn't even an import wizard out for this yet and the mobile interface is not complete (currently works best on 7 in+ touch screens), though unlike vBulletin and IP.Board (no OSS forum software comes with mobile out of the box) it will be full-featured. In the long term I think software like Discourse with the 'new paradigm' will win over ye olde web forum™.

[riidom]

It looks like something I would really like to try out.
To the subforum problem: Isn't it possible to give multiple tags to conversations? There could be GameA, GameB etc. tags, and also General, Modelling, Maps tags then.
The bookmark-a-post feature seems especially useful, since often (at least in RE forum) useful informations are stated in some post, and it can be a pain to dig them out at some time, when needed.

[Sauer2]

BTW: You can vote for Discourse to be included as Bitnami stack: http://bitnami.org/contest