alt Hacker NewsDiscourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.
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It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...
Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
Discourse is horrid on slow devices, try it.
Let's just make something better, please, and that doesn't require JavaScript as we are at it.
I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.
Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.
Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.
Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.
So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.
Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.
I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.
Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.
Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.
Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.
[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...