Discourse

I love Discourse because it's robust and very powerful. It has a ton of features, is open-source and easy to setup (needs a bit of technical knowledge, but they have a ton of guides to help over that). I totally recommend Discourse to anyone looking for community creation/management tools!

Not ready for production. This product is high on promise, but needs another 3 to 5 years to mature (if it survives that long). A great range of promised features, but not ready for prime time. Consider other products. Discourse is not production worthy. It is extremely fragile, with a long list of inter-dependencies on other products, with any updates to any in the long chain easily breaking Discourse. Despite being recommended to install inside of Docker, Discourse's very fragile dependencies also mean it does not do well outside of a very narrow set of platform configuration options (alternative Linux distros problematic). Riddled with a vast array security issues, that do not appear to be taken into consideration. Support is very poor, with a long list of backlogged issues still unresolved. The community is very active, and attempts to help but is very scattered in the support provided. Oversight of support and development is by a single developer that has a reputation for being very immature, very insecure, and often deletes any criticisms and many of the bug reports. If the product matures, check in again in 3 to 5 years to see if improved, otherwise do not consider using this product in any production environment.

[Edited by rightsfight, November 20]

Generally it's a good idea to create a new forum software from scratch because the existing ones are terrible, outdated and slow, yet discourse manages to make some simple things even worse, e.g.:

• Bad overall user experience
• Slow page loading (esp in long threads)
• Search is horrible, impossible to find what one is looking for
• Scrolling on mobile/tables inside threads still sucks (jumps too far ahead, jumps too far back)
• Admins/Mods can restrict user settings way too much, some forums even restrict privacy settings. This shouldn't be possible.
• "Trust-based" system restricts non-mods even more
• Badges are a useless gamification thing and too gimmicky

All in all, the poor UX could be due to the fact that this software was developed from the perspective of a moderator and not a forum user. Some features only serve to further limit user participation, thereby ironically limiting the discourse in a forum.

Discourse is modern and powerful... but its design is retention-based, and their recent developments into a chat tool underline this direction. The main reason i want to use forums is because the discussion may be less noisy, and attention-grabbing... why are they pushing their porduct in this direction then ?

Most users want to disable emails with activity summary created by other users with websites when they don't want to read said websites that often: "when I don’t visit here, send me an email summary of popular topics and replies".

Users have to repeat steps below for most websites with Discourse:

1. click your username
2. click human icon (actually Preferences)
3. click Preferences
4. click Email in Preferences tab
5. uncheck option in question
6. save changes

Body is limited to 32000 characters...

.log files are restricted for new users... .zip files are restricted for new users...