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Modern forum software: Discourse

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Shades:
If Discourse would be applied into Donationcoder.com, would that also not be to gut the whole forum section and surrender it completely to the organization/company behind the Discourse software?

Granted, that would likely take away a load of traffic and subsequent costs. And as such it might be an option to consider. Now I have no clue about the monthly stats or costs donationcoder makes, but I assume that it is between 100k and 500k monthly page views. That would require donationcoder to pay discourse 200 US Dollars a month for their 'Business' plan. Not that cheap. 2400 US Dollar a year buys a nice hosting plan with quite some bandwidth.

So you hardly save in costs, give away the control from a big part of this site to a 3rd party and introduce an extra point of breaking serving a forum that is barely an improvement on the system you already have in place and has proven itself.

Personally, I don't find Discourse to be that nice looking. Previous posters already mention other features in the Discourse system they consider to be flaws. As I don't participate with sites that use Discourse (because it is always disabled by the uMatrix plugin from my FireFox browser) I can't really tell. Yet I gladly take their words for it.

And indeed, web applications are more often than not a (p.ss) poor substitute for a desktop application. I run my own mail server and have installed a web mail interface, but only 1 person in the company actually uses this interface and only when he is not in. I simply do not have the time to waste on the daily load of mail I need to process in any web mail client.

Now there are also good experiences with web-applications. Jira is really great for issue tracking and with all the Skype problems lately, it was pleasant to know and work with MatterMost (on-premise). Heck, I would even say that using WebMin for managing (headless) Linux servers could be seen as a good thing.

Back to the point: There is hardly and benefits in using Discourse, not cost-wise, not feature-wise and you add the disadvantage of having an extra point of failure for your website's functionality. Just for the "pretty"? Now where can I sign up for such a deal...

Tuxman:
If Discourse would be applied into Donationcoder.com, would that also not be to gut the whole forum section and surrender it completely to the organization/company behind the Discourse software?
-Shades (June 29, 2017, 12:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

No. You forgot the self-hosting offer.
But it would still be a horrible idea.

wraith808:
If Discourse would be applied into Donationcoder.com, would that also not be to gut the whole forum section and surrender it completely to the organization/company behind the Discourse software?
-Shades (June 29, 2017, 12:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

Discourse is open source, just like SMF.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You can grab it from there and install it if you want.  Same thing with most of the modern hosting solutions, i.e. Vanilla for a start.

From https://payments.discourse.org/pricing

Good news! Discourse is, and will always be, 100% free and open source software. You can install it yourself on your own server, or for a flat one-time fee of $99, the community can install Discourse in the cloud for you. Please note that a $10/month hosting fee is still payable to the cloud provider (Digital Ocean), and that this option is completely self-support after the initial install. Click here to purchase a self-supported community install.

--- End quote ---

Shades:
My bad, I just saw a pricing page on the Discourse site and couldn't be bothered to go and look for more info (not even on the same page apparently  :-[). While the SMF forum software might look a bit outdated to some, I like its functionality. While I can appreciate "form over function" in some cases, I am more of a "function then form" guy.

app103:
I thought there was not a single human in the universe that thought that the 'old guard forums' were better than Discourse. But @tuxman proved me wrong.
-urlwolf (June 28, 2017, 05:48 AM)
--- End quote ---


We use self-hosted Discourse where I work (SitePoint), and I can't stand it, on the whole, but there are maybe a few features I do like, such as @mentions. So, I am another one that likes SMF better....but not just any SMF, Dc's SMF. (I do miss the old Zillarank search mod, though)

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