Discourse: Next-Generation Discussion/Web Forum Software 141
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood has a post on his Coding Horror weblog about his latest project, Discourse, 'a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.' Along with Coding Horror, Jeff is most well-known for his work on Stack Exchange and its family of related sites. In the same way that he tried to improve Q&A sites, he hopes to make forum/discussion software better with a team of folks he's pulled together for the task. They're using the 'Wordpress model' of offering both open source software and commercial offerings. The software interface is an in-browser app via Ember.js, with a Ruby on Rails and Postgres backend. I wonder if it will ever have an NNTP gateway."
What's new? (Score:4, Funny)
Okay, I only looked at it for a few minutes, but I can't see the difference with classic boards. Yes, it is more fancy, more JavaScripty, but functional, I couldn't get any differences. Just a list of topics, when clicked go to a list of replies.
No voting system, no "highest votes on top", no threading, ...
Re:Roll your own. (Score:4, Funny)
Amen to nested discussions. I guess having a single flat thread for everything is easier for beginners... you just click on the thread and the posts are all meant to be "to do with the title" rather than perhaps some tangent the thread has gone off on. That said, threads do and will go off on tangents, so nested-threading is a great way to acknowledge that.
As long as it doesn't use javascript (Score:3, Funny)
I'll be happy.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:4, Funny)
!I can go to Microsofts tech forums and find out which topics I researched 10 years ago. (Comes in handy when an old fart like me starts thinking, "Didn't I have to solve a similar problem back in...")
What gets me is when I google a particular problem and the first result is a post I made 5 years ago asking the same question. Even worse is when it went unanswered 5 years ago. :(
Re:Interesting idea (Score:4, Funny)
Oblig XKCD [xkcd.com]