The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Our organization has over 1300 employees and even more volunteer contributors. Discourse was used as a pilot project years ago and positioned itself in a more canonical position, turning it into the main communication channel for the whole organization. It has been highly useful to replace old mailing list software with an open source and user friendly experience which didn't alienate power users as they could continue use Discourse via its mailing list mode.
Pros
- User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
- Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
- Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
Cons
- Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
- Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
- Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.
Likelihood to Recommend
Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.
EQ
Elio Qoshi
Creative Lead in Marketing at The Tor Project (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience