[negura]

too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including:

- refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engine)

- every single page navigation triggers the circle animation which blocks the view for up to 3 seconds. how is this not an obvious regression on webforum software that has existed for decades?

- various nonsensical functionality suggests an incoherent code base. like the input element for the searchbox disappearing if the browser window loses focus. if you switch tabs midway for whatever reason, you need to reopen the searchbox every time you get back. and you can't use an external editor to fill in the input. because as soon as you've focused the editor, the element that the editor hooked into no longer exists

- search results are crammed in a narrow responsive list with 5 entries. you need to press 'More' to see the rest of the results as yet another responsive list. you never know how many results there are in total. only that there are more than ones that loaded so far

- long threads are never rendered fully. only as incomplete chunks. so it doesn't work to set positional markers in the scroll buffer to jump back and forth. as soon as you scroll past the boundaries of the currently loaded chunk, the old content gets destroyed and replaced. it feels like having alzheimer's

- you can reply to any specific post in a thread and there will be a visual indicator about which post you replied to. except if you reply to the most recent post in a thread. so someones who reads a post has no way of knowing in advance whether it is being addressed to the post just above it, or to the thread as a whole

i hate discourse so much. i'll never understand why it got so much adoption by FOSS communities. it must be the virtue signalling

[eaf7e281]

I'm not sure where this heat comes from, but what constitutes a "good" forum in your opinion? I would love to check it out.

[baud147258]

while I've just been on forums that have been using xenoforo, I found it a better experience than those running Discourse

[LorenDB]

+1 for xenForo. IMO it has a much nicer UX than Discourse, if only because it uses a more traditional approach.

[Cthulhu_]

These are various reasons why I also opted to not use it when it was finally time to retire vBulletin 3. We never did adopt vB 4 or 5, because while I'm sure the code was "better" from a software engineering perspective (using classes/OOP etc), it was also noticably slower, and the original developers had either been ousted or sold out.

The original vB developers built Xenforo, which is still in the spirit of vB 3 but with some modern amenities like live updates and the like.

I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.

[karussell]

> I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.

Made a completely different experience. Every once in a while you have to run a command. Over the last 10-12 years there were I think 2 problems where this did not work out of the box.

[LorenDB]

You forgot one of the worst parts: the Discobot that tries to make you run through a tutorial every. single. time. you sign up for a Discourse forum.

[negura]

yes! another one i forgot: all the bullshit notifications about level promotions, earning badges and "thanks for spending time with us" inbox spam.

[nixosbestos]

> must be the virtue signalling

I wish you folks could understand how clownish you sound.

[thunderfork]

I do feel like this sinks a post of otherwise reasonable complaints. What "virtue signaling" is discourse even being accused of?

[negura]

i was referring to the blog post. where they pride on having courage to uphold the values of the opensource ecosystem.

[bsenftner]

I hate most of all the information black hole that is discord. I am member of several communities, where difficult issues are being solved using complex new software releases, but if you do not sit and watch the stream for the specific things you want, forget about finding anything useful you want.

Discord is bottomless sea of the same question being asked over and over and over, and the original question poster never seeing their replies. If there was not a notification when your own messages are replied, Discord would be 100% worthless.