[Avamander]

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.

[celdon25]

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.

[Arch-TK]

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.