Discourse

2018-09 Review

In 2018-09, I had just learned about Discourse as I was working on the phplist project. phplist's forums use Discourse. At the same time, Alex Au recommended to Marcin that we setup a replacement forum using Discourse.

Pros

1. Very pleasant interface
2. Very ootb interactive, self-moderating, and powerful (badges, climbing ranks, love, at-calls [@], etc)
3. Very popular. Many, many forums have switched to Discourse over the past several years
4. Great selection of plugins & integrations (though no decent db/index for searching them) https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin https://github.com/discourse
5. Looks like we can import our content from Vanila https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-migrate-from-vanilla-to-discourse/27273
6. Well-funded org that hosts their project (think wordpress.com) for many of their customers. The good here is that Discorse can pay a salary to devs, unlike many open source projects. But it's worth nothing that people choose to pay for hosting probably because it's Ruby on Rails, and a PIA to self-host.

Cons

1. Ruby on rails
2. They openly state that they're hard to install, and therefore _only_ support installation via a docker container
3. I'm seriously worried about the security of a project that thinks it's acceptable to use wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh as a step in their install guide
4. Project has only been around for 5 years (initial release in 2013) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_%28software%29

Noteable sites using Discourse

1. Ubuntu https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
2. Phplist https://discuss.phplist.org/
3. Whonix https://forums.whonix.org/

See Also

• OSE Forum
• Vanilla Forums
• Forum Policy