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.
Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.
Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in newsreaders...
I actually prefer having the thread with the most recent post at the top (or bottom depending on how one sorts it) of the list. That, I find is helpful in terms of keep up to date with the most recent comments. The equivalent in HN would be that the next time you load HN's front page, this particular article would appear at the top of the list and this comment (along with other new comments) would be highlighted when you load the comments section.
Thunderbird does this by default. Reddit breaks threading when sorting by "new". On HN, you have to search the comments page "minutes ago" or "hours ago" to find new comments in an existing thread.
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.
I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.