Why not Discourse?

[goede]

In a announcment joshuaboniface mentions that there was dissatisfaction with Discourse. I wonder what specifically. To be honest, mybb, seems looks and feels dowdy. Here are three examples:

1. I can't use markdown, which is the de-facto standard markup language.
   
2. Text paragraphs are really wide and are IMHO hard to read
   

I am curious what made Discourse a worse alternative.

[thornbill]

I think that is covered pretty well in this thread: https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-edited-i-li...dit-itself

[joshuaboniface]

I think that is covered pretty well in this thread: https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-edited-i-li...dit-itself

I actually never covered the Discourse vs. MyBB thing in that thread ;-)

I, personally, had 3 main issues with Discourse. I don't know how many of these extended to others, but these were my own reasons for disliking it and most "modern" forum suites.

1. This one is Discourse-specific, but administrating it was actually a pain. It's the only notable forum system not written in PHP, instead being written in Ruby on Rails which has a much smaller development, modding, and plugin community. It's packaging also made it hard to upgrade and it caused me headaches upgrading it a number of times.

2. The layout of the forum was far too link-aggregator-like. The lack of clear organization into discrete forums, instead using "tags" and such, made it hard to find relevant areas of discussion.

3. It's post layout I find very hard to follow. The UX was severely lacking in this area, and the lack of good skins (see 1) or skinning support (a la MyBB's theme editor) made it very hard to fix this issue.

I'm sure there were a few others too, but honestly I shy away from anywhere with a Discourse. I just find it feels like the worst aspects of a forum and a Reddit-like link aggregator to use. And clearly most of the team felt the same way as the forums died due to lack of team support/interest.

MyBB does have some limitations, of course. Lack of Markdown being a *big* one (oh look I just did it again myself...) But those can be rectified and we do have someone working on a Markdown plugin to help there, and of course some basic markdown functions have been implemented as BB codes. It's not perfect, but better than the other options.