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Comment by willis936

11 hours ago

Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.

9 comments

willis936

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pelagicAustral  10 hours ago

It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...

Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...

  • random_user_n1  10 hours ago

    Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.

    And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.

realityfactchex  3 hours ago

Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.

So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.

Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.

I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.

Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.

Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.

Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.

[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...

  • K7PJP  2 hours ago

    > Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

    The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.

divan  11 hours ago

Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).

g-b-r  7 hours ago

Discourse is horrid on slow devices, try it.

Let's just make something better, please, and that doesn't require JavaScript as we are at it.