Absolutely not. Most mailing lists are run horribly. With horrible deliverability, security ("don't use an important password here"-clownery plus no SRS, ARC or DKIM) and a plethora of MUA idiocy sprinkled on top. Not to mention way obsolete opinions such as "no HTML at all" or "40kB maximum".
Discourse is one of the nicest to use forum platforms. Works on phones, has normal notifications, proper markdown, nice mention-subscription-quote system, nice plugins (such as abbreviation explainer) and it's not an eyesore.
Jeff Atwood is one of the co-founders of Discourse and probably knows what he is doing. Compared to much of the legacy forum software, it's a big upgrade. His team also, in my experience, has offered very good support for corporate customers.
Source: Was on the team (but not the decision-maker) to replace a very large legacy forum with Discourse.
It's weird how <insert painful and idiotic method of communicating here> gets treated as an endorsement on this website.
For reference, me saying that emailing around pictures of handwritten text would be preferable to discourse was not an endorsement of mailing around pictures of handwritten text.
Also, as a side note, mailing list deliverability sucks because mailing list maintainers are sometimes stuck in the past and think that impersonating users while modifying messages is a good idea.
All the well ran mailing lists either don't modify messages and instead add unsubscribe headers and pass things on, or modify the messages as well as the from email addresses to avoid falling afoul of DKIM and therefore causing deliverability problems due to DMARC rejections.
HTML emails are also an abomination for replying so I am not sure what your point is there. There's basically one standard for in-line replies for plain text emails but there is no agreement on how to in-line reply to HTML emails.
But I can see how someone might dislike emails and don't think its the right solution for forums. That being said, they're still better than discourse.
List of advantages over discourse:
- Don't need a modern PC or phone to render all the javascript
- There's no mandatory (or any) javascript
- My keyboard isn't hijacked for the purposes of implementing an input scheme which doesn't match the rest of my browsing experience and therefore requires me to re-learn how to use my web browser when I go on the website
- I archive the content easily, index it myself and search through it at my leisure
- The UI is as simple as I want it to be
Forum websites should not require javascript for rendering, or even ideally posting, it was never needed it in the past and I never felt like adding javascript added anything to the user experience. It should be simple, secure, easily searchable and above all else shouldn't hijack your keyboard.
One of the design goals of Discourse was that it should work well on mobile phones. I guess most other forum software is either from the time of before widespread smartphone use or it doesn't consider mobile users. With that being said, I actually don't like discourse's UI and prefer more classical forums like PHPbb.
Working well on crappy toy devices = working shittily on actual computers
Smart watches should have taken off, so everything could have been made post stamp-sized to work well on them and become completely unusable on a screen larger than your hand.
Discourse goes a bit overboard with the javascript and all the bells and whistles but I don't understand how anybody could prefer PHPbb over it, other than familiarity. That being said I always found PHPbb abysmal to use, even in the early 2000, so clearly I'm biased.
My main issue with Discourse is that I prefer HN/Reddit-like threading for replies rather than linear comments, but PHPbb does the same and there are pros and cons for both formats anyway.
For some context, I use a keyboard driven vim binding plugin for firefox to deal with the web. Discourse, aside from just being slow on older machines due to all the JS, binds half my keyboard to some nonsense. Apparently due to how firefox works, these bindings take precedence over everything else and there's no way to turn them off.
This is a frustrating web experience for anyone who uses any custom bindings in a browser and it repeats itself every time I use one of these websites.
Lastly, I have no idea why forum software needs absolutely any javascript to just render a basic page. Discourse renders as a blank page with javascript disabled, that's just extremely unnecessary.
Ah yes I love how email is set up so any conversation becomes indented 200 times by quoting the entire previous chain so I have to add another monitor to see the whole thing, while being a complete mishmash of styles from different mail providers.
I donʼt have many strong points, it mostly feels nice to use, be it browsing or participating.
But to name a couple of points: itʼs index-able by search engines (compared to a certain similarly named popular “alternative”); robust topic tracking system: I know exactly where I left each topic off.
Discourse is one of the nicest to use forum platforms. Works on phones, has normal notifications, proper markdown, nice mention-subscription-quote system, nice plugins (such as abbreviation explainer) and it's not an eyesore.