IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.

On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

Thank you. I’ve been feeling really alone.

> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.

The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.

They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.

There's something /off/ about discourse that I can't put my finger on.

In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.

Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using infinite scroll just sucks.

I've also visited some forums recently that do not use discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse invokes.

I also have the same bad vibe with discourse.

For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.

I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.

The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.

Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?

It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.

I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.

> Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?

Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.

They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.

I found that my Discourse instance consistently took ~250 milliseconds to display the forum post list (according to the little box at the top left corner). After getting annoyed with Discourse, I went back to Invision Forum and I see about ~95 ms for the same thing, including sending the response to my browser.

Those are both unreasonably slow in a way that has little to do with the language.

Optimizing responses has diminishing returns once you're below 100ms, but 250ms is far too slow.

Ruby is not necessarily more resource hogging than PHP, but the way typical ruby webapps deployed (all workers processes started immediately and left idling to wait for requests) leads to higher memory usage compared to low traffic PHP webapp (worker processes only started when requests is coming and shutdown afterwards, so you can host a lot of small traffics sites in a small server). If PHP webapps are deployed with similar process lifecycle, I imagine it would consume similar resources.

For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is moot because you're going to end up with a large amount of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway regardless of how you initially spawn them.

I agree about the design, but disagree about thriving-ness. There are many Discourse sites that exist and serve their purposes well.

I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.

Are you perhaps conflating Discord and Discourse? Discourse is certainly a forum in my eyes.

I was :facepalm:

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/

Those numbers are small, There are around 40k posts and 20k users

Vs these, orders of magnitude more users, multiple orders of magnitude more posts

https://www.forumrankings.net/

Also

https://www.neogaf.com/

Yeah I hate it as well :( maybe someone should write an open source forum as well

What about https://forem.dev? I think it powers Dev.to

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.

PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

Some times I get confused at what I’m looking at with discourse. The scrolling timeline thing is super confusing . Much rather have paging.

Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination.

You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.

Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.

The issue with discourse is it isn’t infinite scroll. They break up the timeline into the right side and if you have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time periods thinking you just want the original post and the new stuff.

It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.

Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

> Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking to be reliable.

This is correct. A problem with a sensible solution. When you scroll through NodeBB your address bar updates with the context of where you are. Copying that address will return you to where you were.

Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.

I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.

Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo.

Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.

It has been a problem, that's why there aren't several million more phpbb users. Discourse is filling a niche that hasn't been filled. Slack and Discord aren't right, but unfortunately phpbb isn't it either.

> not a giant scrolling doomswheel

Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.

Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...

Have you tried it? Check it out e.g. [1].

1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.

[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...

It's not as awful as I would have suspected from the description, but I still don't really like it. Bar the fancy "scrollbar" timeline they give you to jump directly somewhere in the page - which does alleviate that problem I mentioned a little - it does feel exactly like infinite scrolling to me, I'm not sure where you're making the distinction between lazy loading and this. The content does physically appear later on the page, making the scrollbar jump around, which I heavily dislike. This renders the native scrollbar pretty much useless as a reference point.

The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.

> Have you tried it?

Yes, it’s awful.

> Check it out e.g.

Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.

How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.

How is navigating millions of comments in a paginated thread any better? That's more than 25 000 pages.

Hmm... man I tried to like this stuff and used it with good faith. No idea why I don't like non-static UIs. I just want everything like a static page, almost like a physical analog piece of paper. Nothing moves. The monitor is like a loupe that I scan through on a giant canvas. I can empathize with people that like new fangled UIs, problem is with me.

It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum from having both features. A forum I'm on has the classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through the forum in whatever fashion they like.

Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?

tl.net, display all.

I agree with all this. But I was talking about the full-text search and tags, which (at least in my opinion) is way better than the old forum engines.

Reading their latest announcement makes me question how alive they are. Feels like an announcement from 5 years ago.

Yeah I actually thought about using it for a project for a second, but they're praising how it now uses PHP7, recaptcha 2, Symfony 3...

Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)

My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.

Having their free self hosting plan linked on their pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to expect companies should the devote the same valuable realestate promoting their free offering as their commercial products which sponsors development.

[1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing

If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.

Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so.

Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.

I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits.

Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.

GP is implying that companies that don't are by definition performing poorly by missing out on the margin.

In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.

Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.

While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet.

So far we're hitting that goal.

Discourse can be hosted on $15-20 VPS since it's need docker and fsr more disk space due to using containers.

I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared hosting.

It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.

Most phpBB-like forums will run fine on your $10/year shared MySQL hosts.

Yes but will Discourse?