Poll: XenForo vs Discourse

[jflory7]

@garbagemule

I don’t know if it’s just because of the current theme, but to me, Discourse looks like something I would expect to see after 2 hours of “My First Website” HTML tutorials. What annoys me the most is that disgustingly neon-green bar at the bottom that shows me how many times I will have to scroll to the “bottom”, just to have another set of posts chunkily loaded into the page. Before anyone tries to defend the chunky loading with “but you would also have to click on the next page to get to the next posts on other forums software”, realize that from a user experience perspective, scrolling up or down a page has a significantly lower “expected delay” than clicking a button at the bottom of a page to get to a new one. Discourse has a lot of usability issues because of how “traditional” forum software works, which is what a lot of people are used to. Saying that people “should just stop being stuck in their old ways” is a very poor argument in the given context - it’s a community forum after all.

The mindless “defense” of Discourse is worrying to me, because it shows that proponents are completely incapable of understanding the perspectives of the nay-sayers. If someone says “this is missing” or “this isn’t as good”, it does, indeed, not necessarily mean that said feature isn’t there or isn’t as powerful, but the fact that someone has had trouble finding it or understanding it is not equivalent to them being an idiot. Perhaps said feature could be more visible, or perhaps it could be more intuitive or better described. Alas, XenForo has a lot of issues as well, one being that it is massively bloated.

I feel this post does an effective job at summing up what a lot of us who are opposed to Discourse are thinking.