Many of us are familiar with discussion forums: webpages filled with chronologically ordered messages, each with a little avatar and varying degrees of cruft surrounding the content.
Forums are a common choice for community leaders and prove to be popular, largely due to their simplicity. The largest forum in the world, Gaia Online, an Anime community, has 27 million users and over 2,200,000,000 posts. They are not alone: it is common for forums to have millions of posts and hundreds of thousands of users.
So, they are a handy tool in the armory of the community leader.
The thing is, I don’t particularly like them.
While they are simple to use, most forums I have seen look like 1998 vomited into your web browser. They are often ugly, slow to navigate, have suboptimal categorization, and reward users based on the number of posts as opposed to the quality of content. They are commonly targeted by spammers and as they grow in size they invariably grow in clutter and decrease in usefulness.
I have been involved with and run many forums and while some are better, most are just similar incarnations of the same dated norms of online communication.
So…yes…not a fan. 🙂
Enter Discourse
Fortunately a new forum is on the block and it is really very good: Discourse.
Created by Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, Discourse takes a familiar but uprooted approach to forums. They have re-thought through everything that is normal in forums and improved online communication significantly.
If you want to see it in action, see the XPRIZE Community, Bad Voltage Community, and Community Leadership Forum forums that I have set up.
Discourse is neat for a few reasons.
Firstly, it is simple to use and read. It presents a simple list of discussions with suitable categories, as opposed to cluttered sub-forums that divide discussions. It provides a easy and effective way to highlight and pin topics and identify active discussions. Users can even hide certain categories they are not interested in.
Creating and replying to topics is a beautiful experience. The editor supports Markdown as well as GUI controls and includes a built-in preview where you can embed videos, images, tweets, quotes, code, and more. It supports multiple headings, formatting styles, and more. I find that posts really come to life with Discourse as opposed to the limited fragments of text shown on other forums.
Discourse is also clever in how it encourages good behavior. It has a range of trust levels that reward users for good and regular participation in the forum. This is gamified with badges which encourages users to progress, but more importantly from a community leadership perspective, it provides a simple at-a-glance view of who the rock stars in the forum are. This provides a list of people I can now encourage and engage to be leaders. Now, before you get too excited, this is based on forum usage, not content, but I find the higher trust level people are generally better contributors anyway.
Discourse also makes identity pleasant. Users can configure their profiles in a similar way to Twitter with multiple types of imagery and details about who they are. Likewise, referencing other users is simple by pressing @ and then their username. This makes replies easier to spot in the notifications indicator and therefore keeps the discussion flowing.
Administrating and running the site is also simple. User and content management is a breeze, configuring the look and feel of most aspects of the forum is simple, and Discourse supports multiple login providers.
What’s more, you can install Discourse easily with docker and there are many hosting providers. While Jeff Atwood’s company has their own commercial service I ended up using DiscourseHosting who are excellent and pretty cheap.
To top things off, the Discourse community are responsive, polite, and incredibly enthusiastic about their work. Everything is Open Source and everything works like clockwork. I have never, not once, seen a bug impact a stable release.
All in all Discourse makes online discussions in a browser just better. It is better than previous forums I have used in pretty much every conceivable way. If you are running a community, I strongly suggest you check Discourse out; there simply is no competition.
Love Discourse. Too bad it’s not php. Sure php isn’t pretty, but it is everywhere. And many php forums come as a one click install with auto update on their cheap shared hosting.
So for the big and medium league, discourse is great. But for the smallest, it’s lacking simply because it isn’t php and bundled.
I am not sure that being written in PHP is all that important. Discourse is pretty simple to deploy with Docker.
That’s the most pointless argument I’ve ever heard.
Yeah, you can setup discourse on digital ocean for $5 a month, with step-by-step instructions here: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-digital-ocean.md . One doesn’t even have to understand what any of it is doing to get it setup and installed.
For me, software not being written in PHP is a pro not a con. PHP has a greater tendency than most other languages to produce hairball code. Such code is more likely to have bugs and security issues.
Discourse is great. It’s a real step up in the forum world. Also keep an eye out for flarum (http://flarum.org/).
I hope you don’t mind me mentioning our hosting service. I work for GreenAnt, a company that also provides Discourse hosting (and integration with Grav sites). We do customised installs that tie in with existing sites (using Discourse as a comment engine). We’re also less expensive than the competitors!
See our offers here: https://store.greenant.net/cart.php?gid=14
I am less then thrilled with Discourse. It is flashy and colourful but has a way to crowded GUI for my taste. Trying to marry the concept of a board and mailing list is always a solution full of compromises. Same thing with Discourse. I think sticking to a mailing list or just a board is a way more efficient method than using Discourse. IMHO
Criticisms of PHP are well-taken, but what if you want to add a Discourse forum to an existing PHP-backed site? I’m pretty sure that was “Nick”‘s point.
Unfortunately 2 of the forums you mentioned are down at this moment. And did you know you could use an affiliate link for Discoursehosting? Have a nice day! 🙂
you convinced me!
I hope you don’t mind me mentioning our hosting service. I work for GreenAnt, a company that also provides Discourse hosting (and integration with Grav sites). We do customised installs that tie in with existing sites (using Discourse as a comment engine). We’re also less expensive than the competitors!
I am a member of a forum that recently switched to Discourse, and I have to say, so far I’m not nearly as impressed as Jono Bacon is. The UI is cluttered, disorganized, even messy. You can’t hide categories that you don’t frequent, and you can’t block users that pester you.
Your only choices with pesky users are to mute notifications for certain users, but that just means you don’t get an email when they reply to you. But I turn notifications off anyway, so that’s essentially nothing. Your other choice is to flag the user, which is fine for an especially egregious offender, but most of the time it’s way too aggressive, like swatting a mosquito with a Buick. It’s overkill. There needs to be a ‘flyswatter,’ which is the missing ‘ignore user’ feature that every OTHER forum has.
Atwood is opposed to this idea, thinking it’s better to make the forum admins nannies, and I have to tattle to them. I don’t like being treated like a child.