Before it's too late

I am 100% in favor of what’s being done here, but before too much is built up here can we PLEASE reconsider the use of Discourse?

IMO it is the worst forum platform to ever exist, I do not understand why it’s as popular as it is. Literally anything else would be better, where forums are forums, threads are threads, and there’s a proper hierarchy.

Maybe I’m in the minority but I’ve seen dozens of forums switch to Discourse, almost always as a result of corporate pressures, including obviously the place that preceded this, and they universally got worse to use in every possible way.

SomethingAwful’s ancient vBulletin is better than Discourse.

I will say back in the days of old we were in phpBB and that was a mess. We (schmooze) were early adopters and funders of discourse. It has its issues but is still one of the best options.

Thank you for the input but we are very comfortable with Discourse and all the built in community controls and moderation to let the community moderate versus having humans having to moderate everything. What is it that you do not like about Discourse specially?

I do not like basically the entire UI.

The unlimited scrolling threads that make long-lived threads hard to navigate.
The way that tags and categories are generally used in Discourse implementations, limiting the number of “subforums” and causing a lot of threads to get jumbled together, which then leads to…
The inefficient use of space in the topic view so only a few thread titles show up on a visible page.

Overall the whole thing has a “mobile app” feel, as if it’s intended to be consumed from a touch device instead of a desktop PC, which I think is a poor design choice for anything aimed at technical users like a forum about a Linux-based server application.

I would counter that question with the question of what do you think makes the user experience of Discourse better than a “normal” forum app.

Having administered a number of forums in the past I can certainly accept that Discourse may be nicer to administer, I’ve never seen that side of it, but from the user side I do not see anything it brings to the table while I can point at multiple glaring ways that it’s worse to use than the traditional forums I use every day.

Apparently I can’t post links or images, so I’ve tweaked the URLs enough to make them not appear as links to the forum software.

For some visuals on that third complaint, here is a screenshot of one subforum of the SomethingAwful forums, running a hacked up version of ancient vBulletin:
nolink://i.imgur.com/9vsY2Bp.png
Here is a screenshot of one subforum of a Minecraft forum, software unknown:
nolink://i.imgur.com/bYDs8rr.png
And here is the General category of this forum:
nolink://i.imgur.com/Cx0tszx.png
I think the difference in information density should be pretty self-evident.

The problems with infinite scrolling for navigation are harder to show in screenshots, but have been well covered by many UI bloggers, and then the lack of nested subforums I hope is just an obvious thing to anyone who uses both.

Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. I am not sure it’s a good use of our resources to investigate and spend time on a forum change with everything we are trying to accomplish here at this junction.