I put a lot of thought on this. Initially I wanted only to send a PM to Jon but I then think that others could back me up.

So, here are some of my reasons why Discourse would be a more appropriate forum platform for a software product (be it Sublime or anything else)

[size=150]Setup & administration[/size]

• Initial set-up it takes 30 mins tops (on a Digital Ocean instance; on a different server things may vary a bit). This includes setting up new accounts for DO, Mandril (for sending mails), Amazon S3 (this is optional) and actual set up of the forum, but doesn’t include migration of the existing phpBB. For auth with Github/Facebook/Google/Whatever, add 5 mins for each. This is one-time task and most likely the whole forum will fit just fine on a $10/mo instance (don’t have time for that? you can pay $100 once and Discourse team will install it for you);
• Maintenance is taking about 2-3 minutes/day (or week, or how often you’d like the forum updated to the latest version). Don’t have time for this maintenance? You can actually buy Discourse as a service

[size=150]Features[/size]

Oh my! I don’t even know where to start here!

• Jon, remember the day of your comeback this year when you asked what features we would like? Instead of having 200 replies that basically said the same thing, users could simply vote for their favorite request. Next, you can simply see which feature is the most requested (you could also ditch that userecho thing);
• When an user ask for a question then another user comes after a month and find that question, instead of replying „yeah, me too!”, he could simply vote up;
• When an user receive a good response for a problem, instead of sending a „yeah, thanks, great” he could just vote up;
• Users can receive notification. Forum wide and on email;
• Users could mention each other (and receive notifications);
• Markdown!
• Users could attach images by simply drag & drop
• Working code highlight (other than faceless, who does some kind of dark magic, all code embeds looks bad)
• No more pagination for long threads, users will simply scroll
• The community could auto-moderate itself (if a reply gets more than X flags it will be automagically gone)

Plus a lot of other small & cool stuff.

[size=150]Other stuff[/size]

meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-wr … phpbb/3763
meta.discourse.org/t/is-migrati … idea/15668

So, please, do migrate!

You just listed half the features though.

• Notifications. Well yeah, @iamntz mentioned that already, but can’t stress that enough.

• You can subscribe to threads without posting (and then stalking search.php?search_id=egosearch)

• Pseudo-two-level discussions. When replying to a comment you can expand the original one completely. You can also expand every quote to the complete post for more context. And you can see all the posts that replied to a comment by clicking on the “n replies” button below a post.

• It generally looks more pleasant. Well, that’s not a huge factor, but had to mention it.

• Even though probably not going to be used, you can customize a lot with css and stuff. There is also plugins, and since we are ST users we sure love dem plugins.

• Work on a reply while reading the thread. You can start with your message by just quoting another comment or replying to it while still reading the thread.

• Active (and open) development. I don’t know if phpbb still receives updates, but according to the footer the version currently running here is from 2007. The developers have also reacted on many of my feedbacks already, even though I pretty much only use discourse on its meta side.

• Probably more…

Main problem: migration. This will likely be the hardest part and since I don’t have experience with running a server myself, I can only say that managing the accounts and preserving authorship is probably not the easiest task, but it is certainly doable.

I know that a migration tool or script exists and with the release of 1.2 I also seem to have read that it’s publicly available. Or you could sign up for this plan thingy and have them do the migration for you, which would however require the $200/mo plan. Can’t do recommendations here obviously.

Also, we don’t exactly “need” this, since we’ve been able to use this phpbb for many years too. It would, however, be a nice service for this community which I am certianly willing to assist somehow, if possible. You may of course finish ST3 first

jps already said he would look into forums later this year. Maybe. He is aware of the issues and options, just no time yet…

I’d like to +1this but there is no button for it

He’s definitely aware.

[quote=“jbrooksuk”]

He’s definitely aware.[/quote]

Yup, and he probably knows the alternatives well enough.

The two guys at the top decided to put up a list off only positive (and somewhat subjective) points about Discourse. Basically sounds like Jeff’s sales force. Of course, as with all software, Discourse has a number of problems as well (for instance, non-serviced instances requires more maintenance than many other forums systems [Rails OOM is common], a very weak permissions system, and so on), and most importantly, not everyone actually likes using Discourse for various (subjective or technical) reasons (azareal.com/why-discourse-sucks, tons of these exists)

There - some balance. So let’s be fair and think when making this choice. No doubt Discourse has some nice features, but it is far from perfect.

(Heck, for a low volume forum like Sublime, phpBB is probably fine - just fix the damn monthly downtime.)

Well, we are obviously biased. I’ve also just used Discourse as a user, not as an admin, so I don’t know how much maintenance it requires, which server requirements it has, how it compares to others etc. Since I’m not in the position to judge those, I just won’t.

I’m admin on two discourse forums (but both are small communities, around 400 users). That’s the reason i compiled all those reasons above

I’m sure Discourse has its own quirks, but compared with phpBB? I think the overall UX is much better.

Jacob, I only read a part of the article you posted and I think that dude has some personal vendetta with Jeff or simply didn’t liked what he read on the About page of the platform. Plus, it’s a bit dated - 2013. I’m using it since june-july 2014 and until now had changed quite a bit; I can only imagine how much had changed since 2013

Yes of course, but it was just a random example of criticism. There’s a few.

The point is, Discourse is not all rosy as this forum post would have us believe.

i tend to feel lost in forums using discourse. i’m still trying to figure out exactly why, but i think the attempt to be minimal gets in the way of visual grouping (or lack thereof).

mind you, i’m not a heavy user of these forums, so i’m sure i’d be fine with whatever gets used.

It’s just a matter of habit. You get used to it in couple of days. Tops.

Obviously, each tool have it’s criticism. I bet that you can find a few entries about how bad sublime is

Surely it has it’s downsides. But for a software product I think it’s way more appropriate compared to… anything else I guess. Can be used as a discussion platform, as a bug tracker, as a features tracker and so on

Things i forgot to mention in the first post:

• You can generate RSS feeds (by simply add .rss to any URL)
• You can generate json „feeds” (by simply add .json to any URL) so you can munch these into a separate app
• looks good on mobile
• have polls (which are fairly buggy, but this is another story)
• categories AND tags

I disagree. Even though meta serves as a bug tracker somewhat, it’s imo not a suitable bug tracker because you can’t close issues in the conventional sense. You can only lock threads and shut discussion down completely, and I doubt you can tag threads as visibly as we do on the github tracker. I much prefer a real tracker. I’d argue it’s also better for feature requests IF github had a “like” feature. It’s impossible currently to express your support of something without spamming “+1” in a github issue, but they can still be closed like normal issues.

It’s good for pretty much anything else revolving around actual discussion though, e.g. when discussing features, plugins or whatever you can think of.

i’ve thought that, but i’ve been on a few discourse-based forums for longer than that, and i still get a feeling of being unanchored, for lack of a better word. perhaps it’s just the default theme that does it to me? i wish i could clarify exactly why. anyway, not a dealbreaker by any means, just one opinion.

Would Discourse help to prevent all this forum spam that we are suffering from?

@mickey: yes!

Lately they also work on implementing akismet.

Sure, it doesn’t catch ALL spams, but let’s just say that on my forums I never had a spam bot. Ever.