We should definitely get more feedback on this forum. If anyone is willing to check the demo or even to register and experiment, that'd be great.
I mean, if we have to do it from scratch; if the current deal works then it's not necessary of course.
https://try.discourse.org/categories
Don't worry about the theme, it can be changed, what's important is the functionality and how easy/intuitive it is.
I think it's a bit disorientating because they use a different paradigm - categories instead of trees of subfora. I think that different concept, and the way it's presented in the default configuration, can seem a bit alien to someone expecting a forum to look essentially like ours. And also, I personally just find their default design to be quite ugly, with not the greatest use of space.
I see what you mean. It didn't strike me on the forums I saw because the categories were presented like a tree (for ex
Manjaro, or
Owlcat - their theme is terrible though), but on the
Discourse Demo it's only one level. The structure is shown at the top, not like breadcrumbs but in a series of dropdowns (1 per level), which may look somewhat overloaded.
There's some confusion about the max number of levels by the way, some say it's limited to 2, we'd need to test if more is possible. Otherwise, we'd have to transform the forum structure when transferring it.
I totally agree with the waste of space. WP's default is the same.
I registered on their demo, and they have the discobot too
You first get an overlay inviting you to check the PM given by the discobot, or to ignore that for now. It presents the basics and reacts to your your actions by sending further PMs to advance in the training. You learn little things like emojis, include a pic, formatting, using @, the 'like' button, flagging a post, doing a search… But you can skip it entirely if you feel it's unnecessary. I'm pretty sure anybody can understand how it works without it.
There's a
trust system with several levels (here there's one level too). There are badges too, and some stats shown on each topic. It's actually quite a playful forum engine, which is nice for people like us
It's also very easy, for ex you just press the paste shortcut to include a picture, or you select the text to quote.
Something else I like is the shortcuts (press ? to see them). And there are tags, so that could be used if my suggestion makes any sense for games / articles / news as a replacement for the DB - at least a plan B if we don't find something else. (*)
=> The differences and the unknown vs a CMS integration are the only downsides I see for now. And the language if I were to be helpful, though it would only be one more to learn which isn't a real issue (maybe it's not even necessary depending on how integrating modules works). I'm tempted to do a local install to check if we have all the features we want, and see how easy it can coexist with other apps on Apache.
(*)
While I agree on the idea of using several tools rather than a 'all-inc' solution, I still believe we must make the right choice from the start, that guarantees us a possibility to get all the functionality we want, instead of having to hack it later.