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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

Discourse is great software and makes it so much easier to launch a forum but i personally never enjoyed the interface. Maybe I’m nostalgic, but I prefer the old style *BB interface with explicit categories/sections. Discourse kind of blurs the line with their “stream” style. This looks like an interesting alternative but unfortunately has a similar interface.

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Discourse has always felt to me like standing on a riverbank and watching random things float by. It mostly works for comments on a blog post, but when I need to unearth specific information or want to participate in a discussion that spans weeks or years, I long for a more traditional forum. When faced with it as a tech support channel, I usually end up frustrated.

Do you mean discord? That sounds like why I prefer discourse/phpbb/etc. over things like Twitter and discord.

No, I mean Discourse. Discord is even worse in that department, and has its own problems.

That blurred line is what turns me off from using Discourse-based forums. It's a neat idea, but it's too, as you say, “stream” styled.

The way I envision it is chat apps are yelling a question in a café, Discourse is walking into said café and setting down a sign then walking out, while classic forums are pinning a note in a library corkboard.

Ditto, I can not stand discourse and am really sad any time I have to interact with it.

I wish they would skip unnecessary gamification notifications that make interacting on it tiresome. If you use different discourse forums this noise adds up quickly and starts being irritating.

Those are not even gamification items...It fails to do whatever it was designed to do...Yaaay your first like...Wowww you replied 5 times...Like, who cares?

There is an option named `Skip new user onboarding tips and badges` in preferences though...

> There is an option named `Skip new user onboarding ...

Thanks for the tip, I had no idea that it could be turned off.

Maybe they should add that to the onboarding?

That was my initial thought too, but after awhile I think it wasn't so much about the flow of conversation I have problem with, but its default design, style, spacing and layout.

And so I decide to check out Discourse again, turns out they Announced [1] a $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital. Congrats.

[1] https://blog.discourse.org/2021/08/discourse-series-a

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