[okfn-discuss] Discourse: new open source forum software from creators of StackOverflow

Mon Feb 11 18:20:14 UTC 2013

For reference, I just spend a long time reviewing all the forum software
out there, including this one.

First, there's a pretty thorough review site that does not yet cover
discourse:
http://www.forum-software.org/

That site is remarkably thorough, licensing details are clear, and
everything. Amazing.

Now, regarding Discourse: it is strictly JavaScript. That means it puts all
the rendering on the user-side. They have an explicit attitude of "everyone
will soon have the fastest latest devices anyway, the iPad4 is already
nearly fast enough for our system." I think this is disrespecting of many
people in the world and creates a gap. Furthermore, some people are
especially wary of JavaScript and use systems like NoScript and LibreJS to
protect their freedom. Discourse will not function at all with these
things, I believe.

Discourse does seem good in some ways, but also cumbersome and complex. Of
course, it is early in its development. I found the use of linear forums
but threaded collapsible replies which are then duplicate, well, it was
confusing.

After a lot of exploration, I decided that my overall favorite FLOSS forum,
although far from perfect, is the nice threaded simplicity and integration
in SourceForge's new Allura system. Allura is dual licensed with Apache and
GPL and uses JavaScript and Python. Allura is a complete system with wiki,
ticketing, forums, mailing lists, and more. And you don't need to use
SourceForge as a host.

Anyway, we at Snowdrift.coop already have a simple functioning self-built
discussion system so we may eventually have that be substantial enough to
contribute back to the community as another option which will be guaranteed
to work sans-JavaScript and otherwise with the latest frameworks; but no
promises on that right now (although if anyone wants to help us, it is all
part of making the best Free/Libre/Open platform for promoting projects).

Cheers,
Aaron
Snowdrift.coop

--
Aaron Wolf
wolftune.com

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> Thought this might be of interest:
>
> http://www.discourse.org/
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
> Director of Policy and Ideas
> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> | @okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
> Support our work: okfn.org/support
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