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.
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.
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.
As someone who has derived great value from many of the 'non-tech' Stack Exchange sites, I dispute your claim that these sites have "bombed!"
Many of them are not (yet) household names like SO is around here, but they have thriving communities and provide real value, answering real questions, and providing legacy content that will be of use to people for decades to come.
This is the biggest problem with the current fad in web design. Designers are designing for their own sense of "look what I can do" instead of for users. People need to stop designing UIs for the sake of seeing how much crap they can stuff in front of my face and start designing UIs to be used.
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.
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.
The most annoying thing about web page UI these days is things that pop up in your face as you pass over them. You look at the page, decide to click something, and as you move your mouse toward it, BLAMO!, some nonsense about Twitter, Facebook, Like Me!, email me to all your friends! jumps up and covers the link you were about to click. You have to jiggle your mouse to shake it off.
Or you are reading, absentmindedly moving your mouse cursor around and POP! POP! POP! things jump out at you, often blocking what you were looking at.
If this forum software is going to become popular, I'm begging the developers to set the default so that you have to actually click an item to bring up a popup window or menu, and you have to at least hover for a while (not just be passing by) to bring up a tool tip.
Books and magazines don't randomly throw things in your face and block your view as you try to read. As you reach up to turn the page, the book doesn't turn into a cell phone already dialing your friends' numbers, insisting that you tell them about the chapter you're reading RIGHT NOW! I'd like my forums to be equally well behaved.
Yes. My first impression was even worse than the usual PhpBB mess that you see every day.
At least your average PhpBB layout is relatively static.
In Discourse everything constantly flickers, pops up, slides out... The information I care about is buried under all sorts of noise; What are the 5 avatar icons in the thread-list supposed to tell me? Why is the thread-information below the first post? Why on earth are reply-quotes hidden by default and reveal with a painful sliding animation?
I love the simple interface of Stack Overflow. They added a lot of crap over the years but managed to keep it on the right side of the screen where it can be safely ignored (I'm only talking about the actual "question"-page, I haven't used any other SO-page in years).
Please make this look more like SO and less like someone trying to use all his favorite javascript widgets on every page...
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?
It also seems very ego-heavy, with lots of user-centric stuff. I find that the more central the concept of a user is the lower the quality of discussion that follows.
StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.
I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.
This is the design of their demo. They aren't selling a design, they're selling software. With a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript fiddling, you can mould it into any shape you want.
The theme shops will appear if the software becomes popular enough.
I think the space is growing, especially in the rails world where it's been stagnating for so long. There's discourse, forem and I've even just released my own at http://www.thredded.com (source at http://github.com/jayroh/thredded)
It's definitely more along the same lines visually as the "traditional" forum but I'm hoping that the innovation in the future pops up in the small interactions. Replying, quoting, splitting threads, moderation, interaction via email, etc
Right now the basics are in place that I hope to build the really good flourishes around.
If anyone is intrigued feel free to ask me anything about it or find me on twitter - @thredded or @jayroh
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.
If you look on the discourse.org website, they are planning to eventually sell a hosted version (including custom domains). Discourse is taking VC funding, and that's their plan for making money.
That didn't stop a bunch of services selling 'free phpBB' installs littered with malware advertisements, to people who didn't know how to deploy a PHP app.
I'd imagine there's a market for a generic push-button "insert dev-provided VM, recieve app" hosting service for these kind of people without being limited to PHP. AWS Marketplace already does this to a degree, just a matter of making a similar service accessible to the GoDaddy crowd.
And to add to your point, since Discourse is taking VC money, it will not supplant phpBB, vBulletin and the likes. Absolutely free software that's been around for more than a decade and web hosts don't have to pay for it either.
Discourse does not have a strong incentive to make their software easy to install. Following the WordPress business model, Discourse wants you to pay them to host your forum.
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.
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.
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.
> Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly.
Yes, and the reason people (mostly) don't use Usenet is because it was free, meaning you couldn't turn it into a property and make people sign up.
As you point out in your wish list, Usenet had a number of very nice usability features. And, notwithstanding a lot of time and effort, they haven't been duplicated in the modern era.
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.
>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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] judofyr|13 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] bonaldi|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wikwocket|13 years ago|reply
Many of them are not (yet) household names like SO is around here, but they have thriving communities and provide real value, answering real questions, and providing legacy content that will be of use to people for decades to come.
[+] [-] papsosouid|13 years ago|reply
This is the biggest problem with the current fad in web design. Designers are designing for their own sense of "look what I can do" instead of for users. People need to stop designing UIs for the sake of seeing how much crap they can stuff in front of my face and start designing UIs to be used.
[+] [-] tomdale|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lukev|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SiVal|13 years ago|reply
Or you are reading, absentmindedly moving your mouse cursor around and POP! POP! POP! things jump out at you, often blocking what you were looking at.
If this forum software is going to become popular, I'm begging the developers to set the default so that you have to actually click an item to bring up a popup window or menu, and you have to at least hover for a while (not just be passing by) to bring up a tool tip.
Books and magazines don't randomly throw things in your face and block your view as you try to read. As you reach up to turn the page, the book doesn't turn into a cell phone already dialing your friends' numbers, insisting that you tell them about the chapter you're reading RIGHT NOW! I'd like my forums to be equally well behaved.
[+] [-] moe|13 years ago|reply
Yes. My first impression was even worse than the usual PhpBB mess that you see every day.
At least your average PhpBB layout is relatively static.
In Discourse everything constantly flickers, pops up, slides out... The information I care about is buried under all sorts of noise; What are the 5 avatar icons in the thread-list supposed to tell me? Why is the thread-information below the first post? Why on earth are reply-quotes hidden by default and reveal with a painful sliding animation?
I love the simple interface of Stack Overflow. They added a lot of crap over the years but managed to keep it on the right side of the screen where it can be safely ignored (I'm only talking about the actual "question"-page, I haven't used any other SO-page in years).
Please make this look more like SO and less like someone trying to use all his favorite javascript widgets on every page...
[+] [-] codinghorror|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] roguecoder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|13 years ago|reply
I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.
[+] [-] markdown|13 years ago|reply
The theme shops will appear if the software becomes popular enough.
[+] [-] jayroh|13 years ago|reply
It's definitely more along the same lines visually as the "traditional" forum but I'm hoping that the innovation in the future pops up in the small interactions. Replying, quoting, splitting threads, moderation, interaction via email, etc
Right now the basics are in place that I hope to build the really good flourishes around.
If anyone is intrigued feel free to ask me anything about it or find me on twitter - @thredded or @jayroh
[+] [-] huhtenberg|13 years ago|reply
Then you will enjoy this I suspect - http://pivory.com
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvilTrout|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heartbreak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
There is market for similar services based around phpBB.
[+] [-] FuzzyDunlop|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhokstar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismcbride|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duaneb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aleyan|13 years ago|reply
If someone is going to setup and run a forum figuring out how to deploy a RoR should be a minimum barrier to entry worth an hour of research.
[+] [-] peterjmag|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickmay|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
Yes, and the reason people (mostly) don't use Usenet is because it was free, meaning you couldn't turn it into a property and make people sign up.
As you point out in your wish list, Usenet had a number of very nice usability features. And, notwithstanding a lot of time and effort, they haven't been duplicated in the modern era.
[+] [-] tomjen3|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jere|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ayanb|13 years ago|reply
Gemfile gives a pretty good overview - https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/Gemfile
[+] [-] mnicole|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codinghorror|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] YokoZar|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nikcub|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
Part of the motivation for this seems to be as a way of supporting Ruby over php for ubiquitous webapps
[+] [-] danneu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewnez|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sams99|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huslage|13 years ago|reply