How many years was gmail in beta 
That’s comparing Apples to Oranges. Discourse publicly mentioned the 1.0 would release the Beta tag, in fact, I’m fairly certain they already updated their FAQ to no longer read “probably not”, but now “Maybe” to the question: Should I switch?.
I can’t seem to remember where I saw they mentioned removing the beta status, so I may have imagined it, but I’m certain I read it somewhere.
I hear what you’re saying. One of the many things we have been discussing is what we can do to make finding one’s way around better.
I’m interested in your views Forum hierarchy - opinions wanted
Oh? How do you know? Is there a roadmap that they have made public showing which milestones are completed? If you have that link please post it here. I would be very interested.
Which part? The August 2013 was based on the dates in the thread you linked us to on the rails forum. They discussed Discourse in August 2013…
As for how I know a lot has changed since then, look at their Github repo. You can see the whole history, the software is open source, so feel free to browse it.
No, that’s not what I mean. I think its obvious that the forum is in active development and that’s all code commits really show you.
I mean how do you really know how close it is to coming out of beta unless you know what’s on their “to do” list and how many are checked off and how quickly they are being checked off.
All I did there was go the railsforum and so a keyword search for “discourse”. What was more telling was what didn’t show up in the search. For instance I only got 4 hits and as you say, probably nothing since August, which tells me its not really a popular topic on railsforum.
What I did find interesting is that they support Tapatalk
Seriously guys, it helps to know your competition. If you’re not doing as well as them do some market research. Find out what they’re doing differently.
As commented about earlier, even in this thread, it seems that Jeff Atwood has simply taken what he considers the best ideas already out there and combined them into a single platform. Does that really make him a visionary? Or simply someone who has a flair for marketing?
And how ironic that a “railsforum” doesn’t use a forum written in rails? It’s amazing that there aren’t more rails options available.
It does look like there’s a tapatalk plugin/gem (aw…how cute. gem/ruby) which might be viable - we’re collecting a list of plugins which might be helpful for the forums, I’ll be sure to add this to the list of ones to be considered.
Trust me, I’m not a fanboy. We’ve been discussing the pros/cons of a possible move for quite a while. I think it comes down to simple economics - the forums as they stand cost a ton to maintain. The vBulletin platform is hurting, and we’ve got enough customizations here to make it difficult to keep up with new versions on a constant basis, simply due to the nature of the design of the software. Add to that the fact that SP is now a rails shop, and maintaining the forums becomes that much more cumbersome, or expensive if they have to go out and hire outside help to work on it.
With discourse (which looks to be the most mature ruby/rails forum out there - at least from what I’ve been able to discern), the existing developers can work on plugins, reintegrating the forums back into the rest of the main site (article commentary, etc), and perhaps other opportunities which just aren’t available to us right now.
Very ironic, like the Magento dev offering his services on a WordPress site.
I like Ruby fine, Rails not so much. and keeping up with Gem versions can be a hassle
I prefer the flexibility of configuration over the limits of convention. But that’s me.
Besides the benefits Rails has from being written in Ruby, I think a strong point is that once learned it allows for churning out websites quickly. I don’t, so that point is moot for me, Maybe @markbrown4; could provide more insight.
I really think that integrating the forums with the rest of SitePoint will be a very good thing
Read their blog… They are approaching their 1.0, all it takes is a bit of “research” the thing you keep hounding us on… 
I’m not seeing the connection… Why would I go to railsforum instead of posting my issues/questions on meta.discourse.org? Obviously the latter is far more beneficial. So I don’t see your point as a valid argument.
Who? RailsForum or Discourse? There is a tapatalk grudge bridge available, but it likely needs some refining, but if you are referring to RailsForum, that’s because they aren’t using Discourse, they are using IP Board. We looked at that, along with Xenforo, etc. The biggest issue was, all of them placed us in a similar situation. Lots of plugins/hacks in a language we have very little resources in.
Hence the move, so we can.
I think you don’t give him enough credit. You should really read his blog.
Lol, now that’s what they call shifting the burden of proof.
I honestly don’t know why you are trying to caricature my viewpoint and then proceeding to fight the strawmen you yourself created.
Well, that’s interesting. I didn’t know about that. Will be interesting to know whether it gets the ok from sitepoint.
Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to reevaluate! In good news, it has very much been sold to upstairs. I’m collaborating with our GM, Jeff and the forum staff to get this done.
We have priority support because this is a partnership. We get good pricing, dev support from the Discourse team, and Jeff is working with me to do the actual migration. In return, he gets a tonne of bug and scalability testing. It’s working well so far.
I welcome everyone’s opinion, but this thread seems to be going downhill a bit. I think we’ve answered all your questions now @Kiwiheretic; and I’d be really keen to hear what others think.
Did Sitepoint give consideration to IPB?. (I’m sure it was looked at) but I’d be interested to know what was the factor of excluding that platform. I admit I’ve used IPB for along time, since its release, and am happy to be grandfathered in with a lifetime license so I’m off the monthly fee they went to… But just like shopping carts… “NO” platform will “Fit” right without a number of mods/edits and then again depending on the edits your always faced to the dreaded upgrades.
With the resources this site has, I’m surprised you dont have a contest to build your own…
It’s funny you should say that as there is project, by one of the members, here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1191091 However that project is still in its infancy and I got the impression that Sitepoint is in a hurry to try something new.
I think IPB is a php forum also isn’t it? I suspect that was the reason it was excluded but ask @Hawk or one of the other moderators for the complete story there.
The problem with IPB, XenForo, and most of the other proposed vBulletin replacements is that they are just basically clones of vBulletin. Granted, some have a more modern look than others, but the problem with a drop-in replacement to vB is that we’ll run into pretty much all the same problems we’re having with vB right now. It doesn’t actually solve the problem in the short-term or long-term.
Out of interest, have you used vBulletin recently?
If so, you’d know how awful it is. I loved it during the vBulletin 2 years, and I didn’t mind vBulletin 3 so much, but the second Jelsoft ended up in the hands of Internet Brands vBulletin went downhill super fast. They raised the prices, the quality of code went downhill tremendously, and it was clearly a project that was ruled by management and not by coders, otherwise we wouldn’t have XenForo today. Add on top of that the laughable mismanagement of vBulletin, and the numerous security issues that vBulletin forums face, I’m surprised we didn’t move sooner. vBulletin is a dead platform from a dead era.
I was recently tasked with setting up a forum for one of my clients, and the choices out there are shocking. IPB and phpBB are bloated pieces of crap, and quite frankly very few designers and clients want to work with such beasts when all they want is a discussion forum. They don’t care about how the postbit area looks, and they don’t care about signatures, or fancy avatars, or reputation systems. Nowadays, there are a ton of forum scripts on GitHub that will hook into a CMS, and quite frankly most of these are better than the big forum scripts. Ever have to try and cater for these scripts on a large production site? I’d hate to be the guys running this forum! Forums are supposed to be basic, but they’ll happily drain your CPU if you’re running a modestly popular site.
Discourse is an ambitious project, and while there are still some things that need ironing out, but in its current state I would say that it’s already a much better forum application than vBulletin. The code is much cleaner, it’s more efficient, and it’s not stuck in the dark ages like most forum scripts are. It’s also got a great team behind it, with a developer that effectively killed many forums off with the creation of Stack Overflow. I think we’re in safer hands with Jeff Atwood than those that run vBulletin, and on Ruby and AngularJS we’re on a modern platform that, after a rocky start, is now mature and proven for web applications.
I can see a lot of people disliking it, but I think a lot of people on this forum need to be dragged into the 21st century.
Hi,
I am not a Sitepoint regular. I registered some time ago, but this change made news at another admin site I frequent and it really caught my attention.
I’d like to understand this statement.
I don’t totally agree with Jeff’s take on the problem with forums
I don’t either, but how can you go with a system based on a premise you don’t agree with? Yes, you said you like what he is doing with Discourse, but noted no facts or details on how Discourse is actually going to improve the user experience here. It is definitely not a given, just because it is different.
I will have to agree with the change. vBulletin has, unfortunately, seen its day and it is very sad for me, personally, to see another great brand ambassador leave vBulletin. But, I can’t knock you for accepting the need to do something about vBulletin. Other large communities have also made that same painful decision.
I would just like to suggest humbly, you think about the way you are doing the change. I’d like to suggest to be more transparent about it. The technical reasons for the change are fairly clear. The “how this community will get better because of the change” reasoning hasn’t been really explained from what I’ve read here and that seems to be the overall concern.
How is the change going to make the Sitepoint community better? What is the problem being solved and how?
I think those questions need answering.
I’ll throw in this word of knowledge from my 14 years of experience with online communities. Changing the software will not stop a shrinking community from continuing to shrinking. The user experience is only a partial factor to community growth and I’d say a relatively small one. Just look at reddit.
So my suggestion is, think about why the community is shrinking and address how the change to a new forum application is going to correct that trend. If you have already done this, communicate the reasoning. I am certain you’ll get a lot less friction for the change, if the reasoning and the expected results for the change are made clear to the users.
Hope I could help.
Scott
We went through a similar transition about a year ago, and it’s no joke/easy task… but I suspect there is similar reasoning behind it. For us, vBulletin just became too cumbersome to maintain and I wasn’t happy with the overall direction it was going.
It took me more than a year to rewrite all the custom applications/stuff I had built on top of the vBulletin framework from scratch (we have many tools that could be stand-alone websites, search engine spider, an advertising platform to buy/sell ad space, etc, etc.) Given all that, it was still worth it to rewrite everything from scratch on an internally better platform and I’d do it again if I had to (it ended up being somewhere around 1.7M lines of code that had to be recoded).
I even ended up writing my own custom importer because we had to minimize downtime (our migration took 33 minutes and consisted of ~75,000,000 records). After the fact (of course… haha) I thought of an even faster way to do the migration which would have yielded more or less zero downtime… just flip a switch. Oh well…
We didn’t migrate to Discourse, but I certainly learned a whole lot about large scale community migrations in the process, so if you guys need any help or recommendations, feel free to hit me up.
I don’t think this is a good idea… However, as the migration is already set to happen regardless of what anyone says, it’s redundant to bring up any concerns.
One thing that I would hope for is that a complete archive of the old forum content is kept accessible to us post migration. To me, SP has always been about its content, so losing any of the contributions by existent and past forum members, no matter how old or dated, would be horrifying.