[__jonas]

Every single forum I see now is using this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.

[mjrbrennan]

I work at Discourse. As a regular user, if you want to prevent these new user badges (and notifications), head to /u/yourusername/preferences/interface and check "Skip new user onboarding tips and badges".

It is in our plans to eventually rework how this new user education and notification system works, and I suppose eventually with https://id.discourse.com/ the intent would be that your preferences follow you to every Discourse site you sign up for, so you could just set it once.

As an admin, badges can be disabled entirely, or individually.

[reddalo]

I just wish that the whole badges thing was off by default. It's a forced gamification that's just annoying and doesn't really teach anything.

Except for that, I love Discourse.

[wormpilled]

It's their way of attempting to fight user churn. Forums need all the help they can get in that regard given the attention economy of today and the giants they're attempting to fight against. Anything novel is a win.

You are just being extremely nitpicky.

[sevenseacat]

Discourse is awful software, from a user standpoint.

But its better than all the other forum software I've seen...

[q3k]

I hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger threads.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

[sekh60]

Thanks, I'll have to look into it too, though the gamification sounds annoying AF.

[mjrbrennan]

I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...