Switching Forums to use Discourse?
#1
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This is just a small idea/suggestion, has there been any consideration of switching the forums to use Discourse?

Being a long-time forum user on a wide variety of forum platforms I've noticed that Discourse seems to generally be quite a bit better than a lot of its competition.

The difference between the platforms is akin to the difference between Phabricator (or god forbid Savannah) compared to GitHub, GitLab or Gitea. It works better across various screen sizes, it has a lot of UX improvements over PHPBB and MyBB. There's abbreviation tooltips, better notification system, nicer moderation tools, people can use markdown and so on and on that make a better whole. There's a lot less ossification and a lot more nice features that really do improve the overall experience. Quite a few large open-source projects have also switched to it.

There's even a migration guide available here. I do think it's doable, would be nice if it were considered.
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#2
Have you seen Xenforo? I wonder how it compares to that. I don't think I've used Discourse, but Xenforo is something like a dream to use on every platform I'd use it on.
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#3
(09-28-2020, 07:02 PM)KC9UDX Wrote: Have you seen Xenforo?  I wonder how it compares to that.  I don't think I've used Discourse, but Xenforo is something like a dream to use on every platform I'd use it on.

I have seen it, but I haven't used more it more than in a very casual sense. Maybe you can try out, say MusicBrainz's or Home Assistant's Discourse, and let us know what you think?
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#4
If it's not broken ... on the other hand, Discourse certainly seem to keep on top of their PRs (myBB appears to have a ton of open issues).
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#5
(09-29-2020, 06:22 AM)lot378 Wrote: If it's not broken ... on the other hand, Discourse certainly seem to keep on top of their PRs (myBB appears to have a ton of open issues).

Having used MyBB more now, it definitely is broken. The editor is just super buggy, it adds random colors, random newlines or even removes some, moves cursor without permission, the undo works worse than it does in a plain text box, the undo also sometimes redos things. It's soo bad Angry I'll do the migration for you if it means nobody has to continue using this thing.
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#6
(10-17-2020, 12:52 PM)Avamander Wrote: Having used MyBB more now, it definitely is broken. The editor is just super buggy, it adds random colors, random newlines or removes some, moves cursor without permission, the undo works worse than it would in a simple text box, the undo sometimes redos things. It's soo bad Angry I'll do the migration for you if it means nobody has to continue using this thing.

There's broken and there's "broken". As ancient software go, myBB has to be counted. But basic replying works nit-picking always finds faults in anything.
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#7
(10-17-2020, 04:12 PM)lot378 Wrote: There's broken and there's "broken". As ancient software go, myBB has to be counted. But basic replying works nit-picking always finds faults in anything.

That's a low bar to be honest... and it's not nitpicking, it's painfully visible to anyone that has actually tried to use this ****. One thing is now certain to me, Discourse is better because it doesn't have these bugs.
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#8
I would sure appreciate this. I've only been using this forum one day and this forum software is annoying and outdated at every turn.
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#9
(10-17-2020, 12:52 PM)Avamander Wrote: Having used MyBB more now, it definitely is broken. The editor is just super buggy, it adds random colors, random newlines or even removes some, moves cursor without permission, the undo works worse than it does in a plain text box, the undo also sometimes redos things. It's soo bad Angry I'll do the migration for you if it means nobody has to continue using this thing.

I haven't used Discourse, and I'm really not a fan of fancy UI features.  However, the WYSIWYG editor in MyBB is really buggy, to the point of being unusable, which I've solved by editing the source of messages.  With that workaround in place, I'm actually fine with MyBB.
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#10
I definitely think Discourse is better personally
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