Poll: XenForo vs Discourse

[RobodudeMC]

Its called an opinion for a reason, I don’t have to prove to you why I don’t like something and nothing you will say will force me to like it. I would think people would like to voice their opinion to the community without being ridiculed for lack of “proof”

[ZeNinja864]

Because its not possible. You can make it possible by possibly breaking both forum software.

[teozkr]

@RobodudeMC

Its called an opinion for a reason, I don’t have to prove to you why I don’t like something and nothing you will say will force me to like it. I would think people would like to voice their opinion to the community without being ridiculed for lack of “proof”

An opinion backed by something specific can be improved upon in the future or at least be used as a basis for choosing something else, sticking your fingers into your ears and yelling ‘LA-LA-LA IT SUCKS I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ is, although technically an opinion, absolutely useless for anything.

[Tythus]

IPB could be nice I just don’t like the way the ‘forum catagories’ are displayed it feels odd

[Adriani6]

I’m still sticking with my idea of having IPB (IP.Board). By far the best forum software out there. (In my opinion )

[anon55597060]

There are lots of XenForo styles that are different to Bukkit one. XF adds organization to post management and ir is quite more wonderful

[sk89q]

This poll is possibly not representative because people who dislike Discourse may not be checking around very frequently.

Gotta be the party pooper.

I do have to say, I don’t have a handle on what topics are really active with Discourse. I just see “Latest” (the front page), read the first few topics, and leave. I also have a bunch of PMs but it’s lumped in with flagged posts in the top dropdown, and it drives me nuts.

[desht]

@sk89q

I do have to say, I don’t have a handle on what topics are really active with Discourse. I just see “Latest” (the front page), read the first few topics, and leave.

The “Top” view (in conjunction with the This Week/This Month/Today dropdown just beneath) should be helpful here. Possibly also sorted by latest activity.

@sk89q

I also have a bunch of PMs but it’s lumped in with flagged posts in the top dropdown, and it drives me nuts.

Yeah, that dropdown isn’t hugely useful, I guess. But you can click your avatar and select Messages from the resulting dropdown. That gives you a very clear list of your PMs.

I do wish Discourse allowed selection of the default view via user preferences, though.

[Lattyange]

XenForo is really, really easier to use than, errr, Discourse is the name of the actual forum now?
And with this forum there is too many javascript… -_-

[desht]

@Lattyange

And with this forum there is too many javascript

If you think XenForo doesn’t use a ton of JavaScript, you really haven’t been paying attention

Anyway, love JS or loathe it, it’s pretty much necessary for any kind of advanced message board system these days, be it XenForo, Discourse or something else.

[IDragonfire]

Filter stuff out

In your preferrences,
you can watch, track and mute whole categories:

It impacts your “New” and “Unread” tab a lot:

@BungeeTheCookie
How do you created the pool?

[sk89q]

Oh I know how to get to the information – I just find it a lot more of a hassle.

[alex_mercer]

I dislike Discourse because its not as organized as Xenforo, plus how are you able to have a Plugin Directory on discourse? on Xenforo you can use their Resource Manager

[coaster3000]

Other than those problems. I do love the way the pages flow and scroll on endlessly.

Also love the rich text editor style using markdown and such.

Another highlight to me is the real time updating of the topic. Or semi real time updating.Either way its nice.

[jflory7]

@Artish1

Xenforo is more organized. Sponge will become a large (or atleast average) sized community, so sponge should have a more organized website/forum only because you don’t want a bunch of posts/discussions randomly around. It would be difficult and very unorganized with discourse imo.

This is also how I feel.

[ClearPixels]

I am torn on this. I like Discourse for its simplistic and elegant design, everything seems to flow and work together. On the other hand, XenForo is much more sophisticated (from what I can tell, I haven’t had the pleasure to use Discourse for very long). I feel that if we expect this community to grow like we all want it to, we need to plan for the future and if that is the case I think we should go for XenForo. Though doing this will make transferring data and profiles if even possible to the new site a difficult and time consuming project, if we did go with XenForo we would need to do it soon, as it would be a hassle to switch message board systems down the road once we are well established in this Discourse site.

[desht]

@Artish1

sponge should have a more organized website/forum only because you don’t want a bunch of posts/discussions randomly around

What do you mean by “randomly around” ? There’s no randomness involved; is it just because the default view doesn’t show posts in the same way that you may have been used to in the past with XenForo?

It really seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Discourse basically boils to down to simple unfamiliarity. New is scary.

[desht]

@ClearPixels

On the other hand, XenForo is much more sophisticated

What specifically do you find to be more sophisticated about XF? I’m not trying to bash XF here, this is a totally honest question.

[jflory7]

@garbagemule

I don’t know if it’s just because of the current theme, but to me, Discourse looks like something I would expect to see after 2 hours of “My First Website” HTML tutorials. What annoys me the most is that disgustingly neon-green bar at the bottom that shows me how many times I will have to scroll to the “bottom”, just to have another set of posts chunkily loaded into the page. Before anyone tries to defend the chunky loading with “but you would also have to click on the next page to get to the next posts on other forums software”, realize that from a user experience perspective, scrolling up or down a page has a significantly lower “expected delay” than clicking a button at the bottom of a page to get to a new one. Discourse has a lot of usability issues because of how “traditional” forum software works, which is what a lot of people are used to. Saying that people “should just stop being stuck in their old ways” is a very poor argument in the given context - it’s a community forum after all.

The mindless “defense” of Discourse is worrying to me, because it shows that proponents are completely incapable of understanding the perspectives of the nay-sayers. If someone says “this is missing” or “this isn’t as good”, it does, indeed, not necessarily mean that said feature isn’t there or isn’t as powerful, but the fact that someone has had trouble finding it or understanding it is not equivalent to them being an idiot. Perhaps said feature could be more visible, or perhaps it could be more intuitive or better described. Alas, XenForo has a lot of issues as well, one being that it is massively bloated.

I feel this post does an effective job at summing up what a lot of us who are opposed to Discourse are thinking.

[ClearPixels]

The way the forums are organized and laid out for the consumer is more of a sophisticated system than Discourse in my opinion. As for Discourse it has the simplistic system going for it, like right now we can access all different forum tags from the front page from a drop down menu. While handy and a very sleek design it isn’t as professional as I think it should be done if Sponge plans to become a popular and reputable project. Though if the web development staff have ideas and features to add to Discourse and would like to post them here or in another topic I would like to read them, as I do have very little experience with Discourse and may be completely judging Discourse incorrectly.

Here is an image of the drop down menu mentioned above.