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, user trust system for easy moderation, climbing ranks, love, at-calls [@], etc) -- co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded Stack Exchange, so expect similar functionality
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
   1. ie: replace wordpress comments with a discourse thread. This may or may not be good.
      1. Example wordpress blog post: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
      2. Corresponding discourse thread for the comments to the above post: https://meta.discourse.org/t/wp-discourse-dysfunctional-shows-only-start-the-discussion-at/36016
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. Discourse explicitly states that they only support newer devices. I'm concerned that means that we may make our content inaccessible to, say, that 6-year-old desktop running windows xp in the machine shop. Indeed, discourse only supports IE 11+, which came with Windows 8.1 in 2013--5 years ago.
5. If javascript is disabled, the site is read-only. JS is a requirement for posting, replying, etc.

Neutral

1. Project has 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