wavyknife
I'm a long-time Discourse employee and this is certainly not intentional, I'm obviously biased — but we help self-hosters out all the time for completely free on https://meta.discourse.org. We can't support every variety of configuration, but we consider every Discourse site progress, whether we host it or not.
You can host it yourself for much less than $50/mo, some people run small instances on a raspberry pi (I work for Discourse)
customers
Discourse has an AI plugin that admins can run on their community to generate their own sentiment analysis (among other things), though it's not quite as thorough as this write up! https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-plugin/259214
We're always interested to see how public data can be used like this. It's something that can be a lot more difficult on closed platforms.
I think we also hear this a bit when people say they prefer "old" forums for unspecified reasons. Traditionally they're very top-down, you almost always enter through a category page... so you're naturally getting a feel for the taxonomy just by navigating to content. Discourse can also be configured this way, but it's very common for sites to default to the "latest" view, which can certainly feel like an endless stream of content.
Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
I'm not going to respond to everything here, but I just want you to know that it doesn't mean I think it's invalid or dismissible. I really do enjoy reading this stuff.
I also don't have the power internally to say "we're doing this now" but I do keep this stuff in mind when weighing in on new features or refactors.
> Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
Yes, it's kind of both. We call it a "timeline," which I guess puts the emphasis on time... but it's tracking how far you've progressed through the topic. You can drag it around to jump to a specific post or point in time.
> A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
I'd prefer this too... to a point. There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
> It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles. We have a few different category/tag styles that admins can configure, but if 90% of sites never change those... then it doesn't really matter... making the options for configuring this kind of thing more apparent is something we hope to improve soon.
>You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
ctrl+f is definitely a common gripe... we try to be smart about it, but the inconsistency may not be worth it in the end.
Essentially we try to avoid hijacking browser search unless we think we can do a better job. Within topics, if there are a small number of posts and they're all on screen at once, we'll use browser search. If it's a long topic and not all the posts are available, we use our search because it searches all the posts in the topic, not just what's on the current "page" of infinite scrolling.
You can also hit ctrl+f a second time to get to browser search, but it's not discoverable and as evidenced by this reply... this is overly complex to explain.
> Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
Good point. We should probably eliminate the color for Uncategorized unless we're using it elsewhere. Admins can optionally turn on the ability to always show "Uncategorized" with the color under uncategorized topic titles... but unless that setting is enabled we should suppress the color everywhere.
> I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
Yes, I agree here 100%. I've raised this a couple times and we're slowly getting there. We actually already have the UI, but need some more work to make it the default for tags. You can see it in action by visiting a URL like https://try.discourse.org/tags/intersection/test/art
You're right that by default we lean towards being more minimal, but we know that's not what everyone wants. One of the longer term objectives we're starting to work on is making it easier for admins to easily change the appearance when they're setting up a new site. There's a lot we can change within our theming system, but at the moment it's not very approachable for the average admin and too many sites look very "default." I'd like to see more different looking Discourse sites that cater to their specific audiences, with different information density, hierarchy, structure, etc... and hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!