Switching from phpBB to discourse?

[kevinkk525]

Having worked a lot with discourse (not discord) recently, I was wondering if more people can see a benefit in switching to discourse. I know ultimately this is up to Damien and might not be an option because it might not be possible to transfer existing posts meaning we'd still need this forum as read-only (there is a migration script https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing- ... /30810/577 but apparently it doesn't fully support the latest version of phpBB yet but they are working on it).

The main advantages I see in discourse are:
- more modern forum approach
- better handling of topics, you can follow interesting topics more easily
- moderation automatically allowed by regular users (with very high activity, they can move posts into the correct category, tag them correctly and rename the title)
- topics can easily be marked as "solved"
- easier/more betautiful to link to other threads and quote from other posts

Who uses discourse? A few examples: https://community.home-assistant.io https://community.jitsi.org

The main disadvantages of the current forum:
- not many moderators
- topics are often without order, esp8266 questions are in "General Discussion", esp32 questions in the category "esp8266", etc
- generally not beautiful, not modern

Setting up discourse is easy with docker, you just need a server that can handle it (should have a few GB of RAM).

Anyway, just thought I asked/started a discussion.

[scruss]

Discourse UX is blecch, and it's very javascript-heavy. It's also kind of creepy-trackery, as Discourse IDs follow you around.

[russ_h]

I do not care for the Discourse UI at all.

[kevinkk525]

Discourse UX is blecch, and it's very javascript-heavy. It's also kind of creepy-trackery, as Discourse IDs follow you around.

Yeah it might be javascript-heavy but it's more powerful than phpBB and it's still fast.
creepy-trackery? I don't know, my local instance has no (external) trackers in it but that does of course not mean that discourse itself doesn't do some tracking.

[scruss]

phpBB will run on anything, while Discourse needs a much bigger (and $/month) server. Yes, it's ugly as, but all of its limitations are known.