
Try Discourse - zt
http://try.discourse.org/
======
WA
It has some interesting new ideas, but there's also some clutter and quite
unintuitive things. Maybe I'm too used to traditional forums like phpBB and
the like, but have a look at this example post:

<http://try.discourse.org/t/video-games-for-pre-teens/101>

1\. Why does the initial question highlight and fade out? I find this
distracting. It's clear that the thread starter is on top.

2\. The information right below the initial post is...weird. What does it have
to do with the thread?

3\. "2 replies below" gets outright confusing. Why? Because you can open this
dropdown-box and find posts that are listed on the same page anyways.
Furthermore, it is not consistent, because the first "direct" reply is in this
dropdown-box, but further down, it is NOT marked as a direct reply. The other
"direct" reply however is marked as such (5th post).

4\. Why does the bar right under a post have a mouseover-effect but doesn't do
anything?

5\. Very interesting: The collection of links that were posted throughout the
entire thread. Good idea!

6\. Also interesting: The participants of that thread. However, I can't see
their names if I mouse-over their pictures.

Conclusion: Looks promising, but for now it has a cluttered feel to it. So,
I'm not sure if I'd actually use it as a discussion forum on my website.

~~~
ams6110
I agree, does too much and tries too hard with the eye candy. The old "Joel on
Software" forums were the best ever, IMHO. No threads, no quoting. This works
to keep the focus on the original topic rather than branching off in 12
different directions.

~~~
faboo
Without threading support though, you aren't really encouraging discussion;
just a bunch of one-off comments on the original material. And even then, you
end up with ad-hoc threading like you see on MetaFilter or 4Chan, where new
comments address old ones by the user handle or comment id.

------
Hates_
Discussion from the coding horror introduction post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172905>

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beefsack
One thing that I'd love to see is more high quality forums as pluggable
components instead of being / as well as being standalone apps.

For Rails specifically, we're using Forem over at Miniand which plugs in as a
Rails engine and shares the same user accounts with the rest of the site via
Devise. A lot of people who sign up to our forums end up converting into
sales, and I believe that part of the reason is the seamless integration via
the single account. Our wiki is also an engine, and also uses the same
accounts, and having it all under one account system has been very much an eye
opening experience.

<https://github.com/radar/forem>

<https://www.miniand.com/forums>

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PavlovsCat
So, in what way does this work in which the forum software we are used to
doesn't? I think that's a rather bold claim. Between customization and skins,
you could also say forums have been more or less perfected 10 years ago,
instead of saying "they haven't changed" ^^

If you say "this works" and therefore imply other things don't, that's just
asking for criticism; so I'd much rather hear why you like this more than,
say, phpBB, in the least fluffy language possible, instead of telling _me_ why
normal forums are broken and this is "obviously" what I need. While I could
give you a long list of things I would see improved in forums in general, this
thing doesn't have much if any of them, and is even going backwards in some
areas, in my books.

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danso
I'm not a designer but I wonder if a little more whitespace could give the
already attractive look an even more professional, refined appearance?

Here's what the individual-thread pages look like with 20px margin-bottom
added: <http://imgur.com/YLbXOVg>

Also, what's the design philosophy behind the button-like category labels,
seen on each forum page and on the categories listing:
<http://try.discourse.org/categories>

Besides the conflict with the action-type buttons (e.g. "Login"), the color of
the labels almost get lost when juxtaposed to the jumble of colorful admin
avatars (I assume the users in the headers are the forum admins). It seems
like plain, black text would make the categories stand out more.

Otherwise, seems like a solid product, even without knowing everything all the
details under the hood. Hopefully this will be a strong alternative for
publishers who don't want to cede control to Disqus/Facebook.

------
stevoski
It is a little too grand in its claims. There have been good alternatives for
years to things like phpBB, etc. I've been using Vanilla for my product's
support forums and it is fine.

I do like seeing people try new approaches though. Even if a little less
grandeur in the claims is needed.

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speeder
My friends said it look like a crazy spreadsheet.

After taking a good look, yes, there are a couple of useless information in
the main layout, I would strip one column or two.

------
ethank
I am really excited about this. I have run a forum for going on 12 years now,
first on Vbulletin and now Invision.

I don't even use the forum anymore because it is so painful. It's a pain to
maintain, to use and run. I have always wanted to do some engineering against
new forum paradigms (and did hack some up) but didn't follow through.

At this point I would try anything that breaks the stale paradigm and
especially if I can host on a paas

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codeulike
Why has the original HN post with 629 points disappeared?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172905>

edit: oh wait, its on the front page again now

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calinet6
There's actually a lot of forum software that works quite well.

I like the name though.

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gritzko
> Topic Not Found > Sorry, we couldn't find that topic. Perhaps it has been
> deleted? > Back to Topic List

Shows that for every topic for me... That's rather ironic...

~~~
PavlovsCat
It gets reset at least once a day, maybe you visited it just when that had
happened.

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lnanek2
I wonder what the tech stack is. At the one company I'm involved with that
made it big, typical forums are just not scalable enough. Even the typical CMS
we had is floored by the number of users. These things are just not,
generally, written to scale. They perform dozens of DB calls per page, run
into locking issues, can't handle enormous user tables, etc..

~~~
blowski
It's open source. <https://github.com/discourse/discourse>

    
    
        Discourse implements a variety of open source tech. You may wish to familiarize yourself with the various components that Discourse is built on, in order to be an effective contributor:
    
        Languages/Frameworks
    
        Ruby on Rails - Our back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully and responds in JSON.
        Ember.js - Our front end interface is an Ember.js app that communicates with the Rails API.
        Databases
    
        PostgreSQL - Our main data store is Postgres.
        Redis - We use Redis for our job queue, rate limiting, as a cache and for transient data.

~~~
lnanek2
Ah, Rails and PostreSQL. That's unfortunate. They have a reputation for not
scaling well compared to more modern technologies like NodeJS and MongoDB.

~~~
darthdeus
trololol?

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meshko
No threaded discussions?

