Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

wil93 · 2014-12-07 02:23:42

What do you think about it? I think that Discourse is cleaner, easier (e.g. no pages) and more usable (e.g. it's mobile friendly).

jasonwryan · 2014-12-07 02:30:02

I'm less enamoured of discourse; too much bloat...

Also, the Flux devs have been good to us.

fsckd · 2014-12-07 02:48:35

Discourse seems to require Javascript. No thanks. One of the nice things about FluxBB is it is usable from console browsers. A user does not need to find a feature-full browser to get help.

Edit: Nevermind, it loaded in elinks. I have no idea why it didn't load at first in dwb with JS off. It did load eventually in dwb too.

Last edited by fsckd (2014-12-07 02:51:23)

karol · 2014-12-07 11:37:32

I'd like to easily link / permalink to a specific post.
I can go through fluxbb forum sections e.g. NC to see what topics were posted. At 75 post-per-page it currently has 557 pages. Let's say I will go through pages 1-100 and restart my browser. In fluxbb, I'm still on page 101, what would happen on a Discourse-based forum?
The sites that use scrolling instead of (or in combination with) pagination like twitter or youtube make it much harder to view large number of posts / threads or go back to older stuff.

ackt1c · 2014-12-07 12:08:26

Original

Last edited by ackt1c (2022-11-05 13:12:12)

karol · 2014-12-07 12:10:51

fsckd wrote:

Discourse seems to require Javascript.

http://www.discourse.org/faq/#browser

Discourse is a JavaScript application designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum web browser requirements are high:
Internet Explorer 10+
Google Chrome 24+
Firefox 14+
Safari 5.1+
We do officially support Internet Explorer 9, but some functionality will be unavoidably broken.

Edit: http://www.discourse.org/faq/#team

with assistance from our designer Kris Aubuchon

His website: http://awesomerobot.com/

Last edited by karol (2014-12-07 12:15:41)

wil93 · 2014-12-07 12:32:16

fsckd wrote:

One of the nice things about FluxBB is it is usable from console browsers. A user does not need to find a feature-full browser to get help.

That's a good point.

karol wrote:

I'd like to easily link / permalink to a specific post.
I can go through fluxbb forum sections e.g. NC to see what topics were posted. At 75 post-per-page it currently has 557 pages. Let's say I will go through pages 1-100 and restart my browser. In fluxbb, I'm still on page 101, what would happen on a Discourse-based forum?
The sites that use scrolling instead of (or in combination with) pagination like twitter or youtube make it much harder to view large number of posts / threads or go back to older stuff.

Actually, while you "scroll through" a discourse topic, you will see the URL automatically updating (with "/1", "/2", and so on, at the end), so, whenever you feel like sharing the post you're reading, you just copy the URL and it's a permalink. Also if you refresh the page it will return back to where you left.

ackt1c wrote:

allowing likes and badges is a good implementation if your looking for social opinion

Consider the fact that Ubuntu has its own discourse instance (I kinda hate the CSS they added, though).
However, about the console browser point, I guess that it's unusual for the average Ubuntu user not to have a full-featured browser. So, for the Arch community, maybe it makes sense to use Flux.

wil93 · 2014-12-07 12:38:10

karol wrote:

The sites that use scrolling instead of (or in combination with) pagination like twitter or youtube make it much harder to view large number of posts / threads or go back to older stuff.

To this specific point, I'd like to let Jeff Atwood respond
https://meta.discourse.org/t/feedback-i … mode/11376

TheSaint · 2014-12-07 13:03:19

I'm much familiar with phpbb as it is for Archlinux.it or SMF, FluxBB has harder editing.

karol · 2014-12-07 13:11:44

wil93 wrote:

karol wrote:
The sites that use scrolling instead of (or in combination with) pagination like twitter or youtube make it much harder to view large number of posts / threads or go back to older stuff.
To this specific point, I'd like to let Jeff Atwood respond
https://meta.discourse.org/t/feedback-i … mode/11376

It might be true for a support topic, but we have https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=65318 with over 3200 posts.
Often I'm not searching, I'm browsing. Are you telling me reading from cover to cover isn't supported in XXI century?

wil93 · 2014-12-07 14:32:08

karol wrote:

It might be true for a support topic, but we have https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=65318 with over 3200 posts.
Often I'm not searching, I'm browsing. Are you telling me reading from cover to cover isn't supported in XXI century?

Of course Discourse supports browsing through all posts (not sure why you thought it didn't). It just has an option to "summarize" long topics.

karol · 2014-12-07 14:57:19

Seems that elinks uses pagination on discouse websites. I can scroll a few posts down and then I get 'previous page' and 'next page' links, so I'm cool.
I understand the benefits of both discourse and stackexchange-like sites. It's nice to go to e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/957337 and get 'Chosen solution' right at the top, but I'm not going to be happy if the things I use that were easy, are harder now, maybe because the design focus shifted and they're now only an afterthought <sniff>

I understand that the concept of pages doesn't really fit the virtual world with scalable fonts and graphics, different screen sizes and resolutions.
I understand that many people don't like the old ways, e.g. e-mail, but Google (now Apache) Wave or Google Buzz seem to be too much.
I do have a problem with 'The Problem' section: http://www.discourse.org/about/why.html but it may be just my problem.

The discourse blog archives use pagination ;P

Trilby · 2014-12-07 16:01:50

I've never really understood arguments based on "XYZ hasn't changed in decades. thus XYZ is bad." Changing just for the sake of change is silly. If the old XYZ really has problems, then get rid of it; but having stood the test of time is not a problem, it's a virtue.

This is not to say I have any attachment to the current common forum system (either here at archlinux.org or in general) - but the "why" link Karol posted just doesn't provide anything I see as a limitation in the "traditional" forum software. The only good point I see there is that traditional forum software is proprietary and expensive. Though I'm not sure this is actually a true claim: FluxBB is FOSS.

wil93 · 2014-12-07 16:04:13

karol wrote:

Seems that elinks uses pagination on discouse websites. I can scroll a few posts down and then I get 'previous page' and 'next page' links, so I'm cool.

Cool! I didn't notice that. It seems to happen also on chromium (when JavaScript is disabled, of course).

wil93 · 2014-12-07 16:19:55

Trilby wrote:

I've never really understood arguments based on "XYZ hasn't changed in decades. thus XYZ is bad." Changing just for the sake of change is silly. If the old XYZ really has problems, then get rid of it; but having stood the test of time is not a problem, it's a virtue.

Maybe it's because I like to play around with new shiny things, but I can see the point in switching to new software which improves on the old software, adopts new standards (and drops PHP ).

Last edited by wil93 (2014-12-07 16:20:12)

Ashren · 2014-12-07 16:32:50

The Discourse interface looks terrible. Looks like a social media interface and nothing like what I'd expect forum to look like. Likes and dislikes I find extremely uninteresting and they don't increase content quality.

And I'm getting old and conservative.

Trilby · 2014-12-07 16:39:28

wil93 wrote:

... switching to new software which improves on the old software, adopts new standards...

That was my point, though. At least in that "why" page, no points are made on improvements or better standards. The arguement is just new for the sake of new. New for the sake of improvements and better standards would be a good argument; new for the sake of new is silly.

karol · 2014-12-07 16:44:58

Ashren wrote:

The Discourse interface looks terrible.

Maybe you can tweak it.
Discourse isn't the only one using these features: http://misago-project.org/forum/project-news-8/

Ashren wrote:

And I'm getting old and conservative.

That makes us two.

wil93 · 2014-12-07 17:04:40

Ashren wrote:

The Discourse interface looks terrible. Looks like a social media interface and nothing like what I'd expect forum to look like.

Mmm.. you should clarify what you mean by social media then. For me, a forum is a social media.

Ashren wrote:

Likes and dislikes I find extremely uninteresting and they don't increase content quality.

They help in fighting spam though (the whole reputation, badges, privileges system which is borrowed by stackexchange) but, most importantly, they enable new features like the Summarize this topic command (which would be difficult, for example, in this forum).

Ashren wrote:

And I'm getting old and conservative.

Come on, we're Arch-ist, not Debian-ist

wil93 · 2014-12-07 17:09:53

Trilby wrote:

At least in that "why" page, no points are made on improvements or better standards. The arguement is just new for the sake of new. New for the sake of improvements and better standards would be a good argument; new for the sake of new is silly.

I agree that there should be a strong argument about the improvements. The main "about" page seems to list them (trust system, mobile friendly, community moderation, real time notification, and many more).

Trilby · 2014-12-07 17:48:08

That does look much better. My critique was never really of 'discourse' - just of the flavor of arguement I've been seeing a lot lately. But I guess I'm getting old, so I should be replaced

Awebb · 2014-12-07 18:36:40

Pro:
1. Nice mobile version.

Con:
1. If I go to the demo page or the discourse meta board, all I see is... nothing. I have to turn on js to see anything at all.
2. Every board powered by that software I visit takes ages to load. I'm trying to be environment friendly, so I browse the web on low-energy low-performance hardware with a fast (30+ Mbit/s) connection. It's all those scripts loading all the time. Even when I try to scroll, it decides to load some more scripts and process whatever.
3. When I hit the bottom of a page, it refuses to let me scroll on my already loaded content until the next page is done loading.
4. I have not found one example page for dynamic page width, they are all just a stripe in the middle of my screen or incomplete in whatever windows size I need.
5. Links (href stuff) don't look like links or behave like links until you click them.

And much more... I was afraid, that normal text pages would "evolve" exactly into this, when RIA was still a buzz word.

ugjka · 2014-12-07 18:53:04

What is the point of going full javascript here? To make the clients do all the heavy lifting instead of server?

Edit: I looked at it and realized that many fancy things it does can't be done on the server side

Last edited by ugjka (2014-12-07 19:08:59)

mrunion · 2014-12-07 22:56:39

My two cents: Please, please, PLEASE do not switch to Discourse. It's buggy, bloated and just not that nice of a tool. Another website I visited switched, and I dislike it so much that I wouldn't create a new account to be able to post again. I just chose to fade away rather than use it.

(And another opinion: Forums are not really "social media" sites because they don't cram stuff I don't want to see down my throat. When I am on a forum, I only view the posts I want to read, and never see anything about other posts on other threads. I am also not encouraged to "join groups" or "like" things, or "share" stuff. That is the "social" part that is so terrible these days.)

Last edited by mrunion (2014-12-07 22:59:15)

wil93 · 2014-12-07 23:37:18

Awebb wrote:

Con:
1. If I go to the demo page or the discourse meta board, all I see is... nothing. I have to turn on js to see anything at all.

Weird. This is what I see on meta.discourse with JavaScript disabled http://i.imgur.com/pL0trkN.png

Arch Linux

#1 2014-12-07 02:23:42

Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#2 2014-12-07 02:30:02

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#3 2014-12-07 02:48:35

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#4 2014-12-07 11:37:32

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#5 2014-12-07 12:08:26

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#6 2014-12-07 12:10:51

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#7 2014-12-07 12:32:16

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#8 2014-12-07 12:38:10

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#9 2014-12-07 13:03:19

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#10 2014-12-07 13:11:44

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#11 2014-12-07 14:32:08

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#12 2014-12-07 14:57:19

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#13 2014-12-07 16:01:50

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#14 2014-12-07 16:04:13

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#15 2014-12-07 16:19:55

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#16 2014-12-07 16:32:50

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#17 2014-12-07 16:39:28

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#18 2014-12-07 16:44:58

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#19 2014-12-07 17:04:40

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#20 2014-12-07 17:09:53

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#21 2014-12-07 17:48:08

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#22 2014-12-07 18:36:40

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#23 2014-12-07 18:53:04

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#24 2014-12-07 22:56:39

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

#25 2014-12-07 23:37:18

Re: Switching the Archlinux forum from FluxBB to Discourse

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