Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try.
I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.
We tried to move from vBulletin over to Discourse but it didn't work out; in comparison, Discourse is very complicated and heavy weight. I want to like it, but it's just as snappy.
Instead, we went for XenForo, made by the original vB developers. It's got just enough modern technology to make it a bit more pleasant, and it's super fast (faster than vB 3). Migrating vB to that was easy enough too (took a while, but faster than Discourse which needed three days for the basic import and then still had a million tasks to run in the background)
My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance.
We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.
Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum.
I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, I've found wikis like Confluence pretty good for quite a few things.
It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.
gilbetron|7 years ago
I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.
dsr_|7 years ago
Proper threading.
Read/Unread tracking.
Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.)
Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.)
Killfiles.
They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google.
These are off the top of my head.
Cthulhu_|7 years ago
Instead, we went for XenForo, made by the original vB developers. It's got just enough modern technology to make it a bit more pleasant, and it's super fast (faster than vB 3). Migrating vB to that was easy enough too (took a while, but faster than Discourse which needed three days for the basic import and then still had a million tasks to run in the background)
ecto|7 years ago
markdoubleyou|7 years ago
We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.
lvh|7 years ago
I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
snazz|7 years ago
LaGrange|7 years ago
alkonaut|7 years ago
Cogito|7 years ago
It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.