WoTC D&D 5e Elements Survey 8

[davidp]

What I know about discourse is that the development has been led by the same guy who led the development of http://stackoverflow.com/ and http://stackexchange.com/, Jeff Atwood. I, as a programmer, love stackoverflow and use it practically every day.

[Parody]

Discourse is a forum software, as Gord mentioned.

Where more "traditional" forum software like vBulletin (used here) is based on static web pages and paging longer threads, Discourse is based on dynamic web pages that load and remove posts as you scroll through a thread.

When I visit a forum, I like to load up a bunch of threads with new posts in the background. Then I can switch through them without waiting for anything to load; if I need to change pages, I can either wait or switch to a different thread while the old one loads. While this is a habit held over from the dialup days it's still a very efficient way to read forums.

You can't do that with Discourse. It only loads (by default, controlled by the server) a very small number of posts. When you reach the bottom it loads a few more; eventually it starts removing ones from earlier, so if you scroll up it has to reload them.

A side effect of "Infiniscroll" is that your browser's built-in navigation controls (like the scroll bar and search-in-page) are broken. Discourse ended up implementing widget replacements to give you such useful information as (very approximately) how far you were into the thread and a way to jump back or forward. It also hijacks Ctrl-F to search the whole site, unless you notice each time and check the checkbox for "just this thread". (Or use your browser features to not let it hijack keyboard shortcuts.)

Another "feature" I don't like is how the default is to mark all threads and posts read a day or two after they were made, whether or not you've read them. You can change this in user settings, but it seems pretty bad at remembering what you've read. I've gotten used to being dumped at the top of the thread each time and jumping down to about where I think I left off.

There are other things (like how it burns through mobile data and battery, or how it spams your browser history if you let it) but I think you get the idea. The practical upshot is that I don't like their design choices or how they ended up implementing them.

All of that is based on Discourse's features. I also don't recommend Discourse because Jeff Atwood's response to no longer wanting to hear bug reports and feature requests from one of Discourse's more active installations was to ban all active users from that site from meta.discourse.org (which is where you report problems with Discourse), delete their posts, and tell them they should move to some other software.

If you're picking a forum software, I highly recommend anything else. My choice would be something more traditional, but style is something for you to decide.

Good luck finding something you and your users find helpful!

[Lexin]

Originally Posted by Gord

I believe it is just another type of forum/social media but more mobile friendly.

Oh, I see. I've had a look at it, and it reminds me very much of Livejournal and it's cousins Dreamwidth and Insanejournal. I don't believe that Discourse can get rid of the trolls, as LJ, DW and IJ have failed to do that with what are on the surface fairly similar formats.

However, I've joined, at least partly to ensure that no-one else gets my preferred username. I'm like that.

[Talerass]

They are probably downsizing is all because of Hasbro policy. Hasbro has a minimum amount of money any independent product line must produce. If it does not meet the minimum it gets a probation then axed. Dungeons and Dragons has not been meeting that target number and hence 5th edition was born to generate revenue.