Discourse (forum software)
Discourse is the weirdest and most ambitious modern forum software out there. Born from web 3.0 hype in the early 2010s, it tried to revamp what an internet forum was by doing weird little things like removing sigs, making quoting hard, making avatars tiny, putting in infinite scrolling, encouraging use of a subdomain, and a template so minimal it takes a CSS expert to make it not look like a complete joke. It is however, extremely functional. Incelistan.net was made using it because it is free, functional, and modern.
Discourse actively discourages content[1] in favor of reading, civilized discussion, and nuanced discussion.
The developers of the software have a very strange attitude for open source developers, by making it deliberately hard for users to customize it to go beyond their vision of the software.
Pros[edit | edit source]
Discourse unfortunately is the most modern and functional free forum software as of 2019, with Vanilla forums a close second. It is open source and also has really good admin tools, spam prevention, and monitoring.
By using it you also are not breaking the law like all the forums that pirated Xenforo. An easy way to take down a Xenforo site is just to tell Xenforo they are probably pirating the software.
The software works really well for real-time forum discussions, with new posts popping up cleanly without a refresh and a notification when someone is typing. It could be very useful to high-traffic, superficial type forums despite discourses devotion to nuanced discussion.
Business[edit | edit source]
Some people charge up to $100 per month to install the software to use the standard plugin set and every feature. A $300 per month plan made for businesses is also available.
Future[edit | edit source]
MyBB, FluxBB, Vbulletin etc should just modernize their UI and then they would be on top again. Discourse may take off at some point if they eventually standardize their odd vision of forums.
Most new forum software is borrowing from Discourse, such as Flarum.