The future of forums, civilized Discourse

Forums have been around for a long long time. However, it hasn’t been until fairly recently that we’ve seen some people trying to improve on the old formula. Discourse is one such project, which I recently used to upgrade an old Simple Machines Forum installation.

I’ve been running the Build Your Own Personal Video Recorder forums for a while now. Sadly, I hadn’t been putting much energy into the forum and on top of that there’s a diminishing interest in actually recording video. Streaming is taking over the world: either Netflix if you want to pay a little bit or Popcorn Time if you really must pirate.

Anyway, the forum had become a mess and was overrun by spammers. It was so bad I had to disable registration entirely, because the automated bots were so good at circumventing all anti-spam measures.

So at the beginning of the year, I decided to move the forum to a Discourse installation to experiment and try out new things. Around the end of February I actually pulled the switch.

The good

  • Although it’s beta, the forum has run very stable on a 1GB Digital Ocean droplet (yes, I’m happy customer of them).
  • Installation was a breeze. I really like how they packaged everything in a Docker container.
  • No more spam. And if there is, it’s almost automatically taken care of.
  • The forum UI itself is well thought out.

The slightly less good

  • Although installation was easy. When I wanted to import everything and keep all old links working, some extra work was needed. This easily took up 90% of the time needed to migrate the existing forum. The Discourse meta forum was very helpful! I also created and open sourced some utility code to redirect your old links.
  • While the UI is clever, it’s a pretty big change from the very structured organizing of most other forums. I didn’t have many regulars on the forum, but I believe the change was a bit too big for them.
  • Customizing the forum’s look is not very well documented, which is one of the reasons the forum still looks very “stock” (the most import reason being other priorities)
  • There’s no easy way to integrate AdSense. Some one who can come up with a good solution is bound to make money with that.

Conclusion

I’m a happy user. I like how Discourse integrates some of the StackOverflow concepts to get rid of spam. I will keep running Discourse and I hope to report back with some of the customizations I’ve done and neat ways I’ve found to use the forum.

Don’t forget: if you want to migrate from a Simple Machines Forum and want to redirect your old links, don’t forget to check out my code (get in touch if you need help)