…that Discourse is not for me.
I can be so clear as I didn’t discover anything which was actually new to me.
All aspects of this framework have already appeared in Forums from old fashioned phpBB to Stackoverflow and Social Networks from LinkedIn to Ning.
Concourse is just a refined concentrate of what I find uninteresting and annoying in all mentioned formats.
I disllke Discourse for its underlying understanding of requirements for communtity management. It isn’t limited to the usual Forum Rules, no. It’s whole universe is built with the assumtion that a “community” has to get strictly organized and structured so that it can further exist and grow. An arsenal of measures is in place to defend the forum against “Trolls” and Spammers and every new user needs to go through a phase of probation.
I think I understand perfectly well why all these elaborate structures were invented.
Of course we are dealing with a problem which is comparable to the Virus problem on Windows vs. some niche OS. As web forums have become so popular they also got popular for spammers - something which is no issue with NTTP, They obviously also got more attractive to idiots. A whole army of ambassadors with different hierarchy levels got invented to take care of this “threat”.
As well as I understand the problem - I still can’t help to find all this all plain ridiculous.
I mean - where do we come from? The existing Rhino Newsgroup is the best proof one can have - that all the rubbish they propose in order to manage the crowd and to protect it against aggressors actually isn’t neccessary. Does using something new which is approachable without custom software really mean having to change so much?
I dislike Discourse for the chosen presentation architecture. One hardly can use more space for less information. The Layout does not even reward the reader with with beauty, playfulness or any other enjoyable fact. It is clearly not geared towards people who enjoy reading long text, the whole thing is optimized towards display of a few hundred characters only.
There is hardly any smaller data in the web than text, but even tex tloads hesitatingly and in fractions.
“You don’t want to wade through all this, will you?” is the underlying assumption this sort of presentation makes.
Sequential loading may be programmatically efficient but it’s also Design for people who prefer gaining an overview with search patterns of I don’t find useful or adviseable.
How many Likes did this posting get? Who says what, what “trust level” does this person hold? How often did this get quoted?
One can not get a quick overview about the direction of a discussion with hundreds of contributions like in the newsgroup: By glancing over the whole thread at once and by checking posts which are days or even weeks appart with many dozens of postings in between. Not so in Discourse.
One can not turn off irrelevant GUI elements in Discourse.
I don’t want any content grouping and popular discussions being featured, I much prefer the linear stream of the NG, without questionable indicators about qualities of content or posters. One get’s tons of notification Emails but one can not answer them directly. One needs to log in each time. Not only to post - one also needs to do this in order to raise in status. Only from a certain “trust level” on one may use the forum fully.
I realize that McNeel needs a replacement for NTTP.
But found foolish to exchange the Newsgroup with this framework as it currently is.
Holger