Sponge XenForo

Meta
61

I like Discourse more and 140$ is a lot of money.

62

a lot*

We don’t have to use XenForo, there is plenty of other alternatives.

63

I find Discourse somewhat irritating - possibly too user-friendly.

2 Likes
64

Discourse, generally, will seem pretty familiar and intuitive to developers. It’s similar to stackexchange, it’s pretty modular, and it’s free.

It, however, is not designed like other forums and the organisation structure is a bit different. I’ve had a harder time trying to find things and figure out how things work.

Should we change?

I’m not sure it’s totally necessary. I think so long as the information is available in a user-friendly way, that should be alright. However, my one concern is that we might have a harder time reaching those with less technical ability or less interest in trying to learn how to navigate.

With that said, I think as the project progresses we should always keep thinking about two main things.

  1. Communication - The main goal of this site is to communicate and connect the community. If it does, it’s doing its job. If it’s not, no matter how idealistic we are, we should adjust and adapt.
  2. Innovation - I think it makes sense to push the community into something new that could be innovative and serve the first need better.

As long as we keep reevaluating, we should be alright.

2 Likes
65

I like Discourse, but the skin could be improved.

Some thread paging would be nice too. I get that Discourse automatically loads/unloads sections of posts, but it’s much easier to remember the location of certain parts of the conversation by page number than post number. It also makes it easier to jump to those locations.

It would also be really nice if there was a way to see snippets of new/unread posts for every category. Discourse allows for sorting by category, but with no cap on the number of threads to display, you end up with a list dominated by categories with an overwhelming amount of new posts.

1 Like
66

I don’t like how thread view is left aligned, I think it should be center. (The page you’re viewing right now)

1 Like
67

Just to reply:

Thread paging - that smallish green box lets you know where you are. It’s at the bottom right. Also each post has a permalink button that greys out and comes back onmouseover.

68

Mostly important when I want to reply to the thread and need to easily jump back to posts I’ve read which are deep in the thread. At least the reply frame will stay open while I search. :wink:

69

I’ve personally used phpbb for my forums in the past(For the past 11 years.), and can agree with that. While they do have mods for it, it can be hard to keep them when you update the forums as each makes the updating process harder, sometimes it may be easier to just perform a clean update and reapply the mods to it afterwards.

70

This is all cute and fun but how is it useful at all to promoting civilised discourse and discussion amongst a community? If you want music, go to spotify :stuck_out_tongue:

71

I came here to write that I like it. It looks pretty nice, but you need to get used to it. While writing this I realised a minor inconvenience. To reply to this topic, I had to go to the bottom of the page to get the Reply button.

It’s nice that when you go back up to the top, it “unloads” the replies that you loaded when scrolling down. The text box also uses Markdown. :smiley:

But I would like emoji’s more than these smileys.

72

You can also:

  • highlight a passage of text and click the “quote reply” button that pops up.
  • hover over a post and click the “Reply” button that appears, then optionally click the speech bubble to quote the post you’re replying to.
1 Like
73

That’s so cool! :smile:

Just to make sure that I am not blind. the “reply to this topic” button is only at the bottom of the page, right? There should be one at the top IMO, but the top one is to quote OP afaik. Would be nice if there was a reply button at the top so you didn’t have to scroll down and load the entire thread just to reply.

74

The only thing i don’t like about Discourse is that you can’t get push notifications ATM.
And because I use some more forums on Tapatalk I Wish it would be supported (but it’s not sadly)

Still it looks really great on mobile, but not everythings works on mine :frowning:

75

But if you reply to a thread without reading it, chances are your reply will be out of place.

1 Like
76

That’s a good point, but that doesn’t necessarely need to be the case. The thread could be about something where the replies are irrelevant, like “From what community are you?” or “What is your favourite this and that?”.
Those threads could be rather long, and you don’t need to read any replies.

77

You should read things then reply.

78

I personally really like Discourse so far. It looks good, and it works well enough for simple discussion. I’m not really a forum power user so it has everything I need.

79

So far I’m really liking the functionality offered by discourse, the style and features it has to offer so far are pretty good, can’t imagine what it would be like with a few plugins yet though. :slight_smile:

80

Discourse automagically keeps track of what posts you’ve read. See the yellow and gray little blobs next to some threads? The gray one tells you how many unread posts there are, the yellow one tells you the amount of new posts since you visited the thread. Click each blob to go to that part directly.

1 Like