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If you want to start your own forum, I recommend FlaskBB. Discourse is awful on so many levels.

As someone who has never (at least knowlingly) encountered a flaskBB forum in the wild, what do you like about it? And what are your gripes about Discourse (the interface is bit whitespace-heavy and 'pop', but serviceable IMO)? Discourse has a LOT of moderation and QoL stuff baked in, so I'm just wondering. Is it the missing old-world feel?

What do I like about it? It's simple, it's written in Python using a fairly lightweight framework, it's easy to adapt and extend with plugins, and it rarely goes wrong in any remarkable way. It's run https://rangerovers.pub since it started.

I just don't like Discourse because it seems to have so many particularly colourful failure modes, like not ordering comments in a sane way, layout-breaking bugs if all 20GB of javascript doesn't download, and that bloody awful infinite scroll "hey instead of just clicking to go to the next page, why not wait a few minutes for an ajax request to time out and blank the page?"

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