
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit - sosuke
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
======
judofyr
Judging from the beta (<http://try.discourse.org/>) it doesn't seem to provide
anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the
posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the
explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current
implementation (it's just an expandable <blockquote> and doesn't really help
me understand the context).

What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":

\- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that
community.

\- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads
together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about _real-
time_ , but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.

\- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than
threaded comments.

\- Encourage longer responses.

There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys_of_having_a_forever_project_whats_your/c81gng9)

~~~
jacoblyles
I remember the first time I used threaded comments. I moved from the 1D world
to the 2D world, and it felt _right_. I can't go back to 1D. I feel cramped.

~~~
archagon
But with 2D comments, there's rarely any actual discussion. It's mostly people
stating their opinions and others individually responding to them.

Looking at the demo page, I love how the threads are 1D, but you can still
switch to direct replies if you just want to follow the sub-conversation. It's
the best of both worlds.

~~~
fudged71
How many individuals have the means to sustain an online conversation? I love
threaded conversations because they are so easily branched. However, I do wish
there were a visual indication of the flow of discussions between two
individuals.

Which brings up an interesting thought: why does a discussion have to be
between two individuals? If we are all reading the two current sides to a
discussion, are we not all entitled to share our opinion to continue the
discussion? It's then a group discussion.

~~~
davorak
Downsides to conversations with more then two people:

* It is harder to build mental model of opposing view as the number of people on the opposing side increases do to inconsistances in their view points, experience, and reasons.

* It can be harder to judge how much an influence your arguments have the more people who are participating.

* Reinforcement with a peer group. There can be a tendency to not examining a topic closely if there is a peer group that shares the opinion and is holding strong in their opinion.

There are many advantages to one on one conversations that are lost in group
discussions. I would love to retain the benefits of one on one conversations
but on a forum involving N people. I do not think there is an easy solution
though.

------
bonaldi
Oh dear, this is what I feared from The People That Brought You StackOverflow:
Numbers _everywhere_. Thousands of tiny icons, all alike.

Stackoverflow seems to me to be a giant case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. "We
made a site driven by points and numbers and rules and gamification and it was
success, therefore it was the numbers and gamification that did it". No, SO
was a success because the tech world was _gasping_ for a forum that wasn't a)
mailing lists or b) expertsexchange. That's all. That's why the majority of
their non-tech sites have bombed.

If Discourse is a success it will be because phpBB is hideous, not because of
any merits shown here. A better model to ape would have been the truly
successful community sites -- think the Well, or Metafilter. Flat. UI that
gets out the way.

Humans are superb at managing conversations, tracking threads and managing
state. It's how forums manage to be so good despite phpBB and the like. Let
the humans get on with it. Get out the way.

~~~
codinghorror
We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you
don't want with a custom theme or skin.

The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed
to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it.

And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than
the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.

~~~
bonaldi
It's not the cosmetic problems of the phpBB design you've brought over so much
as it is the fundamental problems. Take, for example, the list of threads.
Just like phpBB, there are lots of columns of numbers, and stats, nearly all
unnecessary. Likes? Views? Activity? Participants?

The job here is to judge a thread. If a thread's good, people will post on it,
and it will bump to the top. That's it. The only other things you need to know
are title and size (number of posts).

Even the avatars are unnecessary here: either the community is small and it'll
be all the usual suspects on every thread, or the community is huge and most
of the avatars will be meaningless.

phpBB's deep problem is it overloads human conversation with metrics and
geegaws that are there only because they were easy to code. They distract from
the discourse, and I fear they'll detract from Discourse.

~~~
jerrya
Apart from all the space they waste, most implementations of avatars that use
gravatar are a privacy leak, associating the MD5 of the user's email with
every post on the net anywhere.

~~~
Flenser
They should use the MD5 of the username instead.

Edit: You can change both so neither are permanent.

Edit 2: Not disagreeing with you. Only mentioned that username and email can
both be changed to say there's no reason not to use username for the MD5

~~~
jerrya
Yes, but you have to know it's a privacy leak, and then you have to change it.
And in the meantime, WordPress and Gravatar insist it's not a privacy leak at
all.

------
tomdale
I've been beta testing Discourse for a few months now, and can tell you that
this is going to have a huge impact on how we have discussions online.

Jeff Atwood has more insights into how humans communicate in an hour than I do
in a year. Those insights are built right into the software, and I think that
will help many communities take off that would otherwise collapse under the
weight of trolls and apathy.

On a more selfish note, I'm excited to have an open source Ember.js app
available from two of the best JavaScript developers in the world—Robin Ward
and Sam Saffron. It's a great resource for the Ember community. If you haven't
yet, make sure you head over to GitHub and check out what a modern Ember app
looks like.

~~~
raganwald
What problem does Discourse solve that Hacker News doesn't solve right now?

EDIT: Obviously it has a modern, nice interface. That's a win. But I mean more
specifically, what problem of human dynamics does it solve that Hacker News
doesn't solve?

~~~
MrMcDowall
You realize Discourse isn't just for the hacker crowd?

~~~
raganwald
Yes, but Jeff's post seems to suggest that there's something special in the
design that contributes to more civilized discussion. I'm curious as to what
that is. For example, does having a modern interface do that all by itself? Is
there something special about the moderation interface? Little tricks
isomorphic to the way HN makes you wait before replying to replies, and so on?

Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.

~~~
codinghorror
A lot of the moderation stuff and trust metrics isn't visible on the surface.
And to be honest, we've only implemented the first two (new user, not-new
user) and final (appointed moderator) trust levels at the moment.

One way to think of this is as follows: what happens when posts get flagged?
What's the sequence, who knows about it, and how? For that matter, who can
flag?

We do have basic rate limits throughout the app, and they're all configurable
as well.

Much of this has to evolve. I'd love your input on it, too!

~~~
dragonfax
Wait, your saying how awesome its trust metric is and how it will change
everything. Then you say no one can see it. Then you admit that its not
implemented yet.

------
lukev
Modern forum software is much-needed, so I'm glad to see this out there.

But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons
and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.

~~~
codinghorror
We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity
by its nature.

That said, we want to have _excellent_ skinning and theming support, and I'd
love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for
everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it,
right?

~~~
huhtenberg
Oh, hai.

Can you clarify how "100% free and open-source" relates to "For enterprises,
we plan to sell licenses and on-site private instances." ? Specifically, the
licenses part.

~~~
codinghorror
We require a CLA for code contributions, so we have an underlying license to
all the code -- and we can sell it to corporations.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement>

~~~
huhtenberg
Oh, OK. It's the dual-licensing GPL/DWTFYW arrangement. Why didn't you just
say so? :)

BTW. Tried posting a reply in some thread on try.discourse - it showed up, but
then disappeared in a second. Is it some sort of spam filter in action? The UX
made no sense whatsoever.

------
MatthewPhillips
If the goal of this is to supplant vBulletin and phpBB, it has to be written
in PHP, period. A non-programming community is not going to deploy a RoR app,
they're going to FTP some files into the hosting they just bought from
GoDaddy.

~~~
EvilTrout
Once upon a time people said that creating stuff in PHP was ridiculous as Perl
in cgi-bin was way more supported.

As was mentioned, we have a hosted offering planned so people can set up a
forum in a few clicks.

But besides that we actively want to work to make Ruby apps easier to install.
Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that.

At the very least we'll offer VM images and install scripts for various cloud
hosts.

~~~
benatkin
RoR just isn't good at this. It's had more than enough time to position itself
as an alternative to PHP. Node looks promising.

~~~
mattmanser
I think you're just living in the HN bubble there laddo!

~~~
benatkin
Nice ad hom. Care to state why you disagree?

------
peterjmag
I cringed when I saw infinite scrolling as the first feature they're
highlighting on the landing page. I expected it to completely break
back/forward navigation (a la returning to your home page feed on Facebook or
Twitter). However, I played around with the demo a bit, and I was pleased to
see that they've somehow solved that problem. I'm still not a huge fan of
infinite scrolling in general, but this looks like a significant improvement.

~~~
EvilTrout
Thanks. I'll probably write up a blog post of how it's done eventually but the
short version is we use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll
down a topic stream, so you have a unique URL to go back to and share.

There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the
state, but links to other topics push the state.

Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge
headache.

~~~
alxndr
Please write it up!

------
patrickmay
Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly.

My ideal discussion forum software would support threading, would remember
which messages I've read and which I haven't, would allow me to rate both
messages and authors, would provide a personal killfile, and would allow me to
use whatever client I prefer to access it. In short, it would be Usenet
exposed via a web API. No discussion forum software I've seen so far comes
even close in features and usability to what GNUS provided in the 1990s.

~~~
EvilTrout
We are closer to your vision than you might think.

Discourse remembers what you've read and what you haven't. You can "like"
posts or "flag" them as poor.

Our API coverage is almost 100% - our rich JS client consumes our own API for
just about everything, so we actually know it's working because the client
wouldn't work without it.

We also have an (admittedly undocumented) plugin system, where you can install
rubygems that add or remove functionality from the core app.

~~~
Buttons840
The rating of individual users sounds interesting, can you comment on that? I
would like to rate other forum users, and then find conversations composed of
users I like.

------
tomjen3
Wait this thing is written in Rails?

Just a few days ago Patio11 mentioned that the only good thing about the
recent security issues was that Rails didn't have an app similar to wordpress
that would be installed everywhere and never updated.

And now, this.

~~~
codinghorror
Well, we hope that we can popularize Rails to better approach the "it just
works on every server everywhere" PHP ubiquity.

And what's, er, worse? PHP everywhere, or Ruby everywhere?

~~~
mikey_p
I'm pretty sure the real threat is unpatched apps, regardless of what language
they're written in (which was tomjen3's point).

I'm concerned that the relative complexity of upgrading a Rails app with
bundler and application server, webserver, etc is significant compared to the
steps to upgrade the average PHP app (copy the new files over the old ones).

Then again, perhaps an even bigger threat is people who feel smug about
security due to their choice of programming language, which is what you seem
to be hinting at.

------
jere
>Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to
constantly find the Next Page button? We've replaced all that with the power
of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Just keep scrolling down.

While I like this for viewing lists of threads, I'm not sure it's a problem
that needs solving within threads. Maybe it's just a symptom of my confused
mind, but I actually like reading a few pages of a really long discussion,
then coming back later to read more. Here I come back to the top and hell if
I'm going to try to remember where I was.

I no more think paging needs to go away than I think chapters in books need to
go away. Or pages in books, obviously.

~~~
EvilTrout
When you're logged in, we track exactly what posts you have seen. When you
click on the topic again, it takes you directly to where you left off, to the
post!

~~~
jere
Ok, great then!

------
ayanb
Purely from a code standpoint, this is a pretty awesome repository to browse
if you want to see how rails, redis, sidekiq, postgresql, pg's hstore,
ember.js all tie up!

Gemfile gives a pretty good overview -
<https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/Gemfile>

------
mnicole
Any differences between this and Vanilla (<http://vanillaforums.com/>), which
has an abundance of community-created add-ons
(<http://vanillaforums.org/addon/browse/plugins>) and the ability to really
customize the forum to however you want it? I'm on a board that uses it, and
we've been able to integrate inline private conversations into public threads,
multi-user private conversations, the ability to draw a post instead of write
one, etc.

~~~
codinghorror
A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No
crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those
irritating.

Vanilla is certainly much more mature since it's been out longer. Discourse is
new as of today, so we've got a long way to go.

~~~
mnicole
> A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No
> crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those
> irritating.

Vanilla is too, they just charge if you host with them and want customer
support. Best of luck to you guys!

~~~
codinghorror
Not true, the open source version of vanilla does not contain all the
features. Certain features are pay only.

------
Lagged2Death
Forum software is often clunky and old-fashioned graphic-design-wise, and its
search features often are broken, and I'm sure it's not a barrel of laughs to
moderate or administrate.

But what specifically about the user interaction and user experience is wrong
about old forum software that is corrected in this new platform? The sandbox
forum is very nice _looking_ but does it operate much differently from old-
school stuff? Ultimately I'm looking at a list of topics sorted by how
recently they've been updated (and there doesn't even appear to be a way to
change that order).

------
pacemkr
I've been administering a vBulletin forum for 8 years or so. Let me tell you,
this is a great idea.

Just yesterday, I was evaluating a bunch of forum software and came out empty
handed:

The OSS forum scene is just depressing, some of the more popular packages
still use tables for layout. I themed a table based layout (vBulletin 3.x)
once, _never_ again.

The paid packages are just full of shit no-one needs. vBulletin is basically
social networking software at this point. These things are so complicated only
geeks, and I say that with love, can possibly figure out how to use them. It's
a pissing match between competitors.

However, no import (as far as I can tell) means I can't move over to
Discourse. And, in your FAQ, you actually suggest that I shouldn't move. I
think you underestimate how much hate I have for forum software.

As a developer, Jeff, what I really want is SO self-policing features, as a
service that I can use in other products. Discourse is nice and all, but I
want to build something more than a forum.

------
jiggy2011
It's great that they are offering this as a thing you can actually download
and put on your own server or rent from a commodity hosting provider.

The great thing about traditional forums was that they made it possible to
host discussions on controversial topics without fearing being culled by the
platform owner. They also allow forum admins to be entirely free to set their
own rules and create a marketplace in third party extensions.

~~~
codinghorror
Completely, forums are about basic human expression in paragraph form. This is
an essential right and we want to give it back to the world in 100% no strings
attached open source form.

Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few
are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I _want_ to use.

------
jeremysmyth
I've been playing with this for the last 20 minutes, and there are things I
really like and things I don't like.

The good: It's got a lot of the automatic things that make Stack Exchange a
pleasure to use - conversations slide into place nicely, infinite scrolling
feels nice and new, and updates to conversations happen while you're watching.

The bad: The front page is already very noisy, and it's only in test mode. I
expect that with time, the only way to use this properly will involve creating
"channels" with tagging or filtering.

There are two major problems with this outcome. Firstly, if users select their
own "channels", it becomes a reinforcing cycle where each "channel" (or
"room") is only exposed to its own conversation. This is largely what happened
with USENET (and to a degree what happens with subreddits), and while each one
might be good if it stays small, if it doesn't it'll end up being as noisy as
the front page. If managed well, on the other hand, I expect that the
prettiness of conversations as they are now will follow nicely into each
channel.

The second problem with the noisy front page is that as with every other
general purpose discussion site with a front page, there will be a race to the
bottom, where everything that makes it to the front page will be about grumpy
cats or hot girls.

Maybe my criticisms stem from the very nature of discussion forums (look at
the cycle of slashdot, digg, reddit etc.), but I don't see this tech fixing
that problem like Stack Overflow claims to have solved the Q&A problem. I'd
like to think it will though.

------
fragmede
I'd argue that Reddit and other link-aggregation sites like HN are the
evolution of the online messsage board to an online-focused format, though
self/text posts are possible to start general discussion.

The big thing missing is a way to 'sticky/pin' posts, though Reddit makes use
of the sidebar to similar effect.

How Discourse's conversation threading model is quite interesting though, I'll
be interested to see how well it scales.

~~~
shane-t
I agree with you for the most part -- but how many times do you return to an
old HN or Reddit thread a few hours later? It's very hard to see which
comments are new. Even though I like threaded discussion I get a warm feeling
about seeing that new posts notification on a flat thread I was posting in
earlier, and it will make me go back and read the new posts, whereas on Reddit
or HN I usually only go back if someone replied to me.

------
YokoZar
About a year ago, Jeff Atwood came to the Something Awful forums to discuss
ideas for better forum software. Unfortunately, it seemed like he had already
made up his mind on the design, blithely dismissing well-articulated arguments
against things like gamification and having non-moderated hiding of posts.

As much as I like stack overflow, I don't have high hopes for this project. I
fully expect it to be even more full of the terrible metadiscussion about mod
points, tags, visibility, and so on that seem to corrupt half the posts on
places that implement similar systems.

~~~
EvilTrout
I think you might be surprised if you check out what we came up with. You're
right that in the beginning Jeff was interested in gamification, but when we
sat down and started to crack at it, we found the interface itself was in need
of the most work.

You can like posts in this release, but it's mainly to prevent useless "me
too" posts. Users don't have scores. Posts do, but that's just so we can
calculate a summary view for mega threads.

Additionally, almost everything is configurable. We give what we consider
sensible defaults out of the box, but you can disable/tune a lot right now.

We also integrated features suggested by goons like a global API.

I've been a SA goon for almost a decade. I really want to make this software
good. Actually I'll probably post a follow up topic there soon!

------
andrewnez
It would be great to see these vendored gems individually released for use in
other projects: <https://github.com/discourse/core/tree/master/vendor/gems>

~~~
sams99
on the cards, message bus really is awesome, I plan to blog about it. can you
put a request on meta for this? Also I would like to release the "general
consumption" gems as MIT

------
nikcub
This looks great. I recently went through the decision making process with a
client and they settled on getsatisfaction for now but would probably love
something like this.

I'd be interested to know how they came to the decision to use Rails. The goal
here seems to be an application that is easy to deploy across PaaS/IaaS
platforms such as AppEngine (no Ruby support atm, mentioned on the website
though), AWS, Heroku as well as self hosted/installed.

All the apps in this space (behind the firewall, self-installed) to date have
been either PHP (Wordpress, PHPBB, SugarCRM etc.), Java (Atlassian, Jive,
Zimbra) or .NET (Telligent, FogCreek, vBulletin)

The only Rails app I can think of is Redmine (oh, and Diaspora).

PHP is easy to deploy while a lot of businesses are already running either
Java or .Net. It may be more difficult to get Rails deployed, but then again
having a simple virtualization or PaaS target could change that.

~~~
ben336
I think this pretty much sums up why Jeff isn't using php:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-
singularity...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-
singularity.html)

Part of the motivation for this seems to be as a way of supporting Ruby over
php for ubiquitous webapps

~~~
codinghorror
Correct, I can talk about it, or I can do something about it. Be the change I
want to see, and all that!

------
huslage
This is still a friggin popularity contest. Why do communities need to have
any sort of popularity metric attached to each comment (favorites, upvotes,
etc)? There are sites that are meant for this (hacker news), but that doesn't
mean the methods are generally applicable or even desirable.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Agreed. There needs to be some sort of mechanism to flag trolls, etc. This
same mechanism can be used to rank by popularity. This doesn't mean it should
be used that way unless you actually want to promote shallowness and group-
think.

------
mikeleeorg
Out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind starting a new business entity
for this product? Will there be a different management team here, separate
from Stack Exchange, Inc., or is Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. a
subsidiary of SE?

Just curious.

EDIT: Nevermind, just found the answer to my question:

<http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/>

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-
to-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-to-stack-
exchange-for-the-best-reason-ever/) (I didn't realize Jeff had left SE.)

------
pcestrada
Wow... another multi-million user platform has just been born.

~~~
lukev
Not necessarily. StackOverflow was much needed by a well-defined userbase, and
unique in its approach.

This is much more open-ended, and however nice it might be, there are other
products attempting the same thing already.

~~~
codinghorror
It's much more meta, for one thing. SO had a topic: programming. Here we don't
have any particular topic, our goal is to make _your_ topic successful,
whatever it is, through open source software and community.

In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be
successful.

------
seivan
WOW! This whole thing smells like quality. Even to the usage of CoffeeScript
through and through. You guys rock!

Been going through the assets/js and it's really amazing quality code.

------
heartbreak
Discourse is a significant upgrade from phpBB. Awesome.

~~~
evoxed
...and vBulleting, InvisionBoard, etc. (Not free, but that's what all the
'cool kids' had not-so-way-back...)

I'm very interested in trying this out. Besides the nostalgic kick of having
dedicated forums come back the potential for moving forums forward is pretty
great.

------
UnoriginalGuy
JIT loading of comments, eww...

You say it "remembers my place" but does it remember my place across all of my
devices? What if I want to link my friend to a comment? What about SEO, will
my community turn up in google/bing's results?

~~~
EvilTrout
1\. If you log in across various devices you'll end up with links to the last
post you read in the topic. Unlike other forum software we don't consider all
posts on a "page" viewed when the page downloads, only as they are scrolled
into view.

2\. We use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll. Just grab the
link from the URL bar and it'll take you to where you left off. Or
additionally click the "Share button" for a copy and pastable pop up.

3\. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for
google indexing.

~~~
andrzejkrzywda
> 3\. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for
> google indexing.

Can you explain it in more detail? Are you returning different results to
Google bots?

~~~
EvilTrout
No, we were worried that rendering different content for google violates their
TOS. So what we do is render a super basic version of the page in the
<noscript> section with no tools or extras. You can see it if you disable
javascript in your browser.

It's not much to use, but enough for google to get at the words and links.

We're not sure how well it works since the project was secret until today!
We're going to keep an eye on it and adjust for maximum google-fu going
forward.

(Shout out to Sam Saffron who implemented this!)

------
jotux
It's pretty but years of reddit and hacker news make it very difficult for me
to follow message boards without nested comments.

------
rcfox
I guess this puts a previous post of his in context:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-
fla...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-
design.html)

And now I fear for the future of online discussion because I expect that Jeff
will succeed.

~~~
illuminate
What specifically do you fear?

~~~
rcfox
That every forum that I might want to participate in will have linear
discussions and be a nightmare to follow.

------
jimmaswell
Forums haven't changed in 10 years because they got it right back then. I
don't think you really need more than a forum and an IRC for a good place for
a community to gather. I honestly have yet to find a configuration for online
communities I like more than the classic forum and IRC combo.

------
cabalamat
The usability leaves something to be desired. I couldn't work out how to post
a comment. There should be a button marked "post" or "send" or something.

Also, comments aren't threaded. They should be, because once there arem ore
than a few, a flat form makes it hard to easily tell what is a comment to
what.

So, while their is definitely room for better forum software, this isn't it.
Personally I prefer the way my <http://meowc.at/> website does it (obviously
I'm biased), even though its a lot less polished.

~~~
cabalamat
> I couldn't work out how to post a comment. There should be a button marked
> "post" or "send" or something.

I just came back to it and a Reply button suddenly appeared. I assume this is
a bug.

------
wpeterson
I'm interested to see a new tech stack for Discourse vs. StackExchange:

Ember.js and Rails backend vs. C#/.NET

~~~
tnorthcutt
I suspect the dichotomy might have something to do with open-source vs.
proprietary.

------
ferongr
It's something that many people will consider pretty according to today's
trends (fixed-width text, rounded corners and gradients and monochromatic
icons and tooltips) but from reading the announcement I expected something
more. Looking around the Discourse site, I just can't find what makes
Discourse special and my first reaction after 5 minutes of poking around was
"Well, okay...". Maybe someone else can explain it to me.

~~~
codinghorror
You have to look at the other choices to appreciate part of it. I know, this
is a little bit like saying "we are the prettiest object in a room full of
ugly objects".. but.. well, see for yourself:

<http://www.forumcon.com/>

There are very, very few 1st tier forums that are fully open source, too. None
that I know of!

------
eranation
Looks great overall, we just recently discussed how bad are open source forum
options and said how nice it would be if SE would open source / sell the
stackoverflow Q&A format for companies for internal forum-like discussions. So
I find this to be great, much better than the alternatives,

Here are a few confusing things in terms of UX though:

the "New" button, expected: create a new topic, instead, took me to "You have
no new topics to read." page e.g. it seems the "read new stuff" is merged with
"create new stuff" (the "create new topic on the right")

the "item has x replies" thingy, I understand you want to have replies in
context, but this duplication confused me, e..g I wasn't sure if it's a new
"type" of reply. how to solve it? well I would do one of the following: either
just link (via scolling to the right location via an anchor / scroll
aniumation) or keep what you have right now but also have the link so pepole
can see the original comment as well

So far so good, thanks for sharing this, I'm happy twice, both needed a Q&A
forum at work, and also wanted to learn Ember.js (version 1)

------
togasystems
A one click button to export from phpBB and vBulletin would be amazing.

~~~
codinghorror
We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not
prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much
technical and social friction to wholesale forum change.

And it's early, very early in our beta!

Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch"
kind.

~~~
daniel_reetz
I definitely need an importer to be able to use Discourse. I have been looking
for a way to get away from PHPBB for years, and would happily move to
Discourse, but if I can't bring my content and user posts with me, my
community won't follow, either.

Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just
don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts
you could make.

------
notatoad
It doesn't appear to be responsive, is there a mobile version? The biggest
problem i see with phpBB and the like is that they're a huge pain in the ass
on any sort of mobile device, and then you get abominations like tapatalk
filling the void. If somebody wanted to solve a problem with online discussion
software, that's where I'd start.

~~~
ville
From their github readme:

    
    
      This vision translates to the following functional commitments:
    
      1. Support all contemporary browsers on the desktop:
    
      Internet Explorer 9.0, 10.0+
      Firefox 16+
      Google Chrome infinite
      
      2. Supporting the latest generation of tablets:
    
      iPad 2+
      Android 4.1+ on 7" and 10"
      Windows 8
      
      3. Deliver support for mobile/smartphones as soon as possible:
    
      Windows Phone 8
      iPhone 4+
      Android 4.0+
    

So it seems that mobile support is coming, "as soon as possible".

------
jjsz
I'm patiently waiting until the heroku instructions come out. Thank you, also
waiting for the donate button.

~~~
AnthonBerg
Trying to get a dyno up atm. It's fun.

------
thingification
I hope it's not stating the obvious to say there's often a gap between the
interests of participants, and the interests of people looking to get
information from threads later on.

I've found that forum moderation sometimes fragments a forum audience across
"boards" to no helpful organisational end. This reduces the value of forums
for the casual conversation and debate uses (as opposed to retrieval of
information later on).

Separately: For the participants, I think threads that discuss issue x for the
hundred-and-first time are more often wanted than they are unwanted, because
repetition of casual conversations is not a problem. This is despite the fact
that participants often complain about such threads. The silent majority of
readers presumably have a different view on it.

------
ori_b
I have yet to see anything that can beat a good old fashioned mailing list for
discussion, sadly.

------
desireco42
I have to give credit to Jeff and developers here, setting this to try it out
almost felt like php in terms of how easy it is to run. I wish other rails
projects were this easy to try out.

Oh man... :) it is a little busy interface. Let's see if this helps or gets in
the way.

------
jacoblyles
Non-threaded discussions are simply broken. They visually combine multiple
conversations into a linear thread. Since threaded discussions came about in
the mid-2000s it is apparent that linear discussions are simply inferior. They
are cacophony.

------
sytelus
Come to think of it... what would it take to convert HN in to a true
forum/community discussion website? I love the compact, get out of the way UX
without mug shots of people sprinkled all over. I love the fact even more that
there is no way to post LOLCats pictures inline with text that would take away
attention and occupancy unnecessary space on screen real estate (you can of
course link them). It has all the necessary elements (threads, karma and so
on). I think only thing we need is to be able to tag posts, search, TeX and it
could be far better forum website than feature bloated Discourse.

------
Joeboy
On vaguely this subject, I had an idea that I mean to implement but so far
haven't found time. The idea was for a captcha-type system that required the
user to match bad arguments to whatever logical fallacy they fell into, eg.
they'd have to match "If we tolerate homosexuality, how long before it becomes
normal for people to marry their pets?" to "slippery slope fallacy".

I think requiring people to answer a few of these correctly might raise the
standard of online discussion, both by keeping dumb people out and setting a
tone of reasoned debate.

Please steal this idea, as I don't know when I'll find time to do it.

~~~
bct
That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate
arguments.

Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of
fallacies.

~~~
Joeboy
> That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to
> evaluate arguments.

I think the chances of somebody learning to match the entries without
understanding at all are fairly low. Computers could do it of course, but
that's a different problem.

> Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of
> fallacies.

The former is not a necessary consequence of the latter and the latter is not
a prerequisite for the former, but I think if your debate only involves people
that know about common logical fallacies it's likely to be a better debate.

------
DanielBMarkham
This looks great! Thank you.

I wanted to try it, but because it's rails and I haven't gotten into rails, I
won't. You have me for a few minutes of playing around and putting on a site
somewhere but not for a multi-hour excursion into a big can of worms I'm not
familiar with.

I know people are ragging on you and I don't mean it like that. I just thought
it was important to point out that you are deliberately raising the bar for
the community. Perhaps that's a good thing! Beats me. I am not complaining,
just pointing out that this choice has consequences.

------
dinkumthinkum
I want to look into this in more detail and I'm not making any judgments; it
does sound interesting. However, I have never understood why Jeff hates forums
so much. I visited discourse.org briefly, and I think congratulations to the
team, but right now I'm not sure how this so much better than the "evil"
forums. Right now, I feel like this is something that feels like a bit too
much going on the site for me to get it; I certainly don't see how this
trumping the horrible "b-movie" that is allegedly what forums are.

------
logical42
I'm personally very excited to be picking through the ember application(s).
It's rather rare to find large-ish open-sourced ember codebases, so I'm pretty
stoked about this. Thanks!

------
bernardom
I'm surprised that he compared forums to stackexchange and the customer
service sites (uservoice, desk, etc), but didn't mention Quora.

That said, open source forum software sucks, so thank you!

~~~
codinghorror
What is Quora?

~~~
georgemcbay
Answer #1: Quora is a question and answer website.

 _To see more answers, please login to Quora so we can show everyone what
you've been looking at on Quora._

...

------
showerst
Remind me of LiveFyre or Disqus.

Speaking of the wordpress of forums, does anyone have experience with
<http://bbpress.org/> ?

------
mattquiros
I share their opinion on other forum software, but for god's sakes the UI is
an eyesore, literally. I clicked on try, and when the home page loaded, I
didn't know what to do next because everything looked clickable.

I know they'll be improving on it later but I don't understand how UI was not
a priority in the first release. One of the main reasons why the other forum
software suck is that their UI sucks.

------
csense
How does the infinite scrolling work when you have topics with 10000+ posts?

I'm halfway tempted to install it and learn the API just to answer this
question.

~~~
dangrossman
The infinite scrolling works in both directions (up and down). There's a "jump
to last post" and "jump to first post" navigation aid to the right of the
comment list. You can also start anywhere in the middle of a conversation if
someone gives you the permalink to that comment.

No matter where in the conversation you begin, only a limited number of
comments are preloaded into the page (before/after your current position), and
the rest get loaded as you scroll down or up. If you're a search spider or
other bot loading the canonical URL of the discussion, it's rendered in plain
HTML and paged into multiple HTML pages if very long.

~~~
tomjen3
I often read things on the bus over a not so stable 3g connection.

How does infinity scroll work with that?

~~~
dangrossman
You're far too young to be a luddite -- the only difference between infinite
scroll and paging is whether the action is initiated by swipe or click. If you
have a connection, you get more comments, if you don't, you don't. Maybe you
have to reload or click the permalink to a comment to try again; you have to
jump through the same hoops if you clicked a page link without a connection.
When you do have a connection, infinite scroll is preferable on 3G since only
some JSON has to be loaded rather than a full page of HTML wrapping it.

------
akavlie
Check out the browser requirements. IE10+, Chrome 24+... wow.

<http://www.discourse.org/faq/>

~~~
Zikes
Normally when I'm working on a new project without clearly defined platform
requirements, I'll start with most the modern platforms available and then
work my way backwards. It speeds up development and causes less grief.

------
sgdesign
Interested to know how people think it compares to Telescope
(<http://telesc.pe>), which is more of a traditional HN-clone social news app
(also open source by the way).

(I also posted in the other topic, sorry for the double post but I'm really
interested in knowing what people think since both apps have similar goals)

------
prodigal_erik
After <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029>, I would expect this
team's tools to embed values that greatly differ from mine regarding "trolls"
and "bad actors" and controversy, and would be unlikely to participate without
some sort of transparent oversight.

------
diggan
The official Github-repo in case any one want to run it themselves:
<https://github.com/discourse/discourse/>

Install instructions:
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.m...](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.md)

------
polskibus
I'd rather see more information on one page than fixed width layout. Some
threads can get veeery long and you have to go through a lot of comments to
get to answer that is most important to you. Are you guys planning on
experimenting with different layouts, or you'd rather not diverge from
stackoverflow path ?

------
fogus
I'd be happy to try it, in fact I have a site idea dying for a good forum.
However, like all things new what I'd hate to have happen is to install it,
get some messages flowing and then have a huge problem upgrading to the next
version. He cites Wordpress, but can he make it as painless to upgrade as
that?

------
eranation
A bit off topic, since this is done in Rails, and we all read the dreadful
warnings about the remote code execution exploit, how safe is it now? (I plan
to run internally at work)? Are the latest YAML vulnerabilities patched? Just
do 'gem update rails' often? Also is the rubygems.org exploit behind us?

~~~
EvilTrout
Not only does it run the latest stable release of Rails 3.2 (which was immune
from the latest security vunerability), but I made sure we are running the
latest versions of all Rubygems.

Having said that, this is very much an early beta right now. We expect to get
a lot of feedback over the next little while, and we want to integrate that
before we release a 1.0 stable that we'd be comfortable telling many people to
install.

If you install it now, you'll have a more complicated upgrade path to our 1.0.

------
asdfs
Was 4chan an inspiration for this? It seems much like a mix between 4chan and
a more typical phpBB-style forum.

It's quite similar to what 4chan would be if threads were archived forever
(which is actually the case for some boards), if 4chan had user-based
moderation, and if anonymity was removed.

------
chmike
I don't see how trolling can be stopped. Anyone can add a reply to a new
discussion and since the reply can be anything, then trolling is easy and
there is no dissuasive pressure on it. What I feel is missing is the
possibility to down-vote messages or something like that.

------
dspeyer
The threading here is completely broken. Replies are hidden unless I _mouse
over_ the post being replied to. Some of the messages are tagged with "in
reply to $username" but I can't tell which of that user's posts.

If I need a forum, I'll create a subreddit.

------
mathattack
I guess this answers, "What's he been up to?" Great for him! The need is real.
I feel like most discussion boards I'm a part of haven't evolved much relative
to the rest of the internet. Even news.ycombinator.com is a case in point.

------
dendory
It seems like a forum trying to focus on everything, with no real way to
surface content. The result is that you end up getting lost in a sea of random
topics. Also, the abundance of colourful little icons is a bit annoying.

------
ashleyblackmore
I've been looking forward to seeing what Jeff was going to put out next. If
Discourse is anywhere near as well thought-out as Stack Exchange, it could be
a great success. Congrats and best of luck, Jeff!

~~~
DanBC
I agree that it's exciting, and I really hope it's successful. I like the SE
model.

But the great things about SE are

i) strict moderation

ii) limited, clear, scope

iii) separated meta

Some of that can be helped by the software, but most of it comes from human
involvement.

I'm still not sure how the new software will ease the problems that forums
face.

i) Web searching a problem returns a hit for a forum. I visit the forum, to
see someone asking my question, and someone else saying "Search the web,
noob".

ii) People just love feeding trolls. It's trivially easy for trolls to disrupt
forums.

iii) Vested_Contributors - forums have rules. New users get punished for not
following the rules; long term users have people making excuses for them
("It's Bob! Everyone knows Bob! And he makes great posts normally, so let him
off this time!").

iv) Signal : Noise - and this is made worse by having limited number of posts
per page. A 29 page thread, with many people saying "Wow, great!!!" is a sucky
experience. Especially since most forum search software really sucks.

------
jacoblyles
I always thought reddit would turn into the next-gen forum, especially after
it went open source. But it didn't have as big of an impact as I hoped. reddit
is a giant step beyond things like phpBB.

------
leot
I'm at Scholarpedia, and we're looking for people to help replace MediaWiki
talk pages with, basically, this.

If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you, please contact
support@scholarpedia.org

------
speeder
Whoa, this is even more awesome than Postline!

Well, granted, Postline still uses frames, and I know only one site that uses
it (and I tried using it once, got too confused and dropped out)

------
mandlar
I'm really surprised to not see a .NET backend especially since StackOverflow,
etc. was built on .NET MVC. I would love to hear the design decision behind
that.

~~~
michielvoo
According to Jeff Atwood:

"Well, I love .NET -- it is amazingly fast and incredibly well designed"

"But for open source projects, there's just too much friction in a Microsoft
stack. So it was either Python or Ruby and @eviltrout had an extensive Ruby
background, so... here we are."

Source: <http://try.discourse.org/t/-net-vs-ruby/415/11> (That forum is reset
every day, so this link will expire soon)

------
chmike
The interface is a to cluttered for me. Too much noise compared to the signal.
The interface of Hacker News is much better in this respect.

------
cmbaus
Open Source? Well I guess it is time to get to work:
<http://discoursehost.com/>

------
DanBC
I'm interested to know how they'll handle the meta stuff that can kill some
forums.

All the vested_contributors or trolls or etc.

------
tnorthcutt
Will this eventually look better on small screens? Right now it's lackluster
(I'm on an iPhone 5).

------
varjag
Discourse (the name) sounds an awful lot like Disqus. Enough at least to
confuse me initially.

------
pgrote
I wonder what the vBulletin folks think about this. They've been the market
leader for years.

~~~
angersock
First place in the remedial English spelling bee.

------
ratherbefuddled
Please give me the option of using more than 55% of my screen width. It's
2013.

------
zacharydanger
Looks neat. Wish there were some code to poke around in, though.

~~~
moserware
<https://github.com/discourse/core>

~~~
zacharydanger
Thanks. Didn't immediately see the "Fork Us" button.

------
sharjeel
"100% free and fully open source."

I can't find any link for the source code.

------
sankage
Why use PBKDF2 instead of bcrypt for password hashing?

------
DannoHung
Multiple Categories per Thread please! PLEASE!

------
martinced
Atwood says that SO is a place for great questions and great answers.

I totally disagree. SO is a place for answers (sometimes great) which are
fitting the "bandwagon threshold theory" (where every
technique/tool/methodology/concept too recent is considered dumb and shred to
tears but once there's a sufficient number of early adopters, suddenly it
becomes the one way to do things).

And SO is certainly not a place for great questions. Great questions are sure
to bring the ire of the mods and the relentless hate of the participants not
understanding the question. Great questions require discussion, background,
exchange of points of views. And only then can great answers be given to great
questions.

Great questions on SO are the ones with 200+ votes and are nearly always
closed.

------
martinced
After having pissed on Open Source for years and swearing only by Microsoft
technologies / C# / SQLServer, Windows, etc., may we ask you why this time you
went Ruby on Rails / PostgreSQL?

Realized that 99% of the forums out there are running on LAMP stacks and "If
you can't beat them, join them"? (I'm not talking about not being able to beat
forum software, but about not being able to beat Open Source / Ruby /
PostgreSQL / Linux)

It's funny to see a die-hard Microsoftie eventually turn his jacket,
especially after having defended Windows / C# / SQL Server so strongly for all
these years.

I'm sure people will use words like "pragmatism" or "that's what the team
knew" but still...

I can't help but laugh while thinking back at all these blog entires by Atwood
pissing on Open Source and pissing on Linux and praising Microsofties as if
they were semi-gods.

------
recoiledsnake
Wow, this is exactly what the internet needs. Hopefully XDA developers moves
to this. I am not sure that XDA is a good fit for Discourse, but the forums
they use are exactly the wrong thing to use for such a site.

Builtin forum search is just terrible. Improve just that and using forums will
be 3x better.

------
lhnn
I /really/ hope Playframework guys see this. Their "community" is a google
group and "search for 'play-framework' on StackExchange!".

Drives me bonkers. Hell, a reddit forum would be better!

And aren't there forum/mailing list hybrid that allows people to interact
through web or email? even THAT would be better!

------
martinced
Why that move?

Is it a bit like professional poker players who then move on the stock market
"because that's where the real big money is"?

There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to
dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked...
Meanwhile the big forums have daily numbers of message posted that dwarf SO so
much that you'd need logarithmic scale to even see SO on the graph?

So it's trying to play where the people are really hanging out?

Glad to see that they heard all the criticism and realized that you couldn't
go very far with a strict "no discussion" policy.

Every single interesting thing ever written can be followed by a healthy
discussion. Glad they figured that out.

~~~
pseut
> _There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to
> dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked..._

I don't see this as the reason the other sites tanked at all; there are a
limited number of fields where someone without much knowledge can verify
whether or not they got a correct answer. Shell scripting? Hell yeah.
Statistics? Not really. (I used the stats stack exchange for a little while
and it immediately became clear that most of the questioners had absolutely no
ability to figure out if an answer was correct, since you can't just type it
on the command line and see if it worked).

I don't know how much a discussion forum changes that problem.

------
itistoday2
I ARE CONFUZZLED BY THIS WEBSITE!

