You guys are bad designers. Discourse is strictly superior to traditional forum design. It isn’t messy and unprofessional. That opinion, with nothing to back it up, just shows a hatred for change and no sense of interface design.
There’s no practical arguments being made here, it’s clear people are just uncomfortable because it’s not what they’re used to.
Well, you just made an opinion with nothing to back it up with…
Because the burden of proof is on you guys. You are the accusers. You are the ones claiming something good is bad. Similarly if I were arguing whether or not the sky was blue, there is a limit to how much I can do to substantiate any argument I make. At some point, it simply becomes evident that the person claiming the sky isn’t blue has nothing to go on and that the majority is indeed correct. The majority is not always correct, but the burden of proof belongs to the person going against the majority. So far it’s just “bad design” or “too busy” which are just obviously false claims. If people cannot put their argument into words, it is because they don’t have one, they are just afraid of change.
There is something to say about both. For instance Discourse is very lightweight and easy to use. However XenForo has got more features and you can easily see who is online etc…
Yours sincerely,
Marijn van Wezel
Try not to make such a direct attack. Make an argument that tackles their points, not one that cuts them by saying they are bad designers. That is strictly your opinion as design is generally a subjective experience.
I’m not going to read the entire thread, and assume that the thread starter is just blanket attacking Discourse because they don’t welcome change (I’ve seen a post by them before doing the same thing, recommending XenForo.)
I think people need to show acceptance of change. I think Discourse does forums anew. It does them in a new way, and it uses the space provided on screen to do it elegantly. There are much less page loads and the forum feels, quite distinctly, faster.
Now, if you disagree, great, let’s start another thread and discuss it. But seriously, just take some time to get to know the software. It’s actually quite fun to use and I love it, personally.
XenForo, sorry Discourse 
I am a bit lost with Discourse.
Ok @TelFiRE The burden of proof is not totally on us, you are the one supporting something new. You have to prove why discourse is worthy enough to succeed XenoForo and why it is better. The final forum setup for sponge is still up in the air as this site is simply a precursor to what sponge will actually be like. So you have to prove that Discourse is better.
In agreement with @sk89q I think that it is too much of a hassle to find information efficiently and also, the chunk loading of the scrolling annoys me because, as it has been said, a user expects to be able to scroll smoothly and expects a small wait time clicking a button. Frankly I hate chunk scrolling and I know it is not just me, it just annoys me to have to wait to scroll to the bottom. For those of you who say things like
and @jdersen is not the only one doing it, who ever said that new has to be good. I could write a small SQL database powered forum software in a day or two, call it new, and it will never come close to being as powerful or scalable as XenoForo is. So the “just accept change” argument is totally invalid, that is not an argument. Also, for the people who don’t want sponge to look like bukkit, they want a “fresh” experience, XenoForo can be extremely flexible in how it looks if you take the time to design a theme for it. I just don’t like Discourse, it feels weird to me and it is going to feel weird to a lot of people.
This may be the greater sampling of the Minecraft developer community but sponge is going to be handling the server owner community and many, many other plugin developers. Discourse will force all these people to learn how to use a new system, it all boils down to how a new user is going to feel entering the forums and I don’t think that a brand new user is going to find the information they need easily with Discourse.
Why is this a thing? It’s not like that Bukkit was an STD to try to run away from how it looked. I really don’t get it.
Discourse does have a page which is more traditional when it comes to laying out forums and sub forums.
Well the equivalent for Discourse which is categories and sub-categories, see http://forums.spongepowered.org/categories
Oh very nice! I hadn’t seen that yet. Thanks for sharing!
Discourse is unorganised and Xenforo would be much better for the forums.
I never knew having to prove something made the other side immune from proof.
My bit of opinion: Xenforo and Discourse both have organisation features, it’s just what will be best for a large forum, and what will be easy for a new user to get the hang of.
Once we actually start rolling out plugins, I think that we’ll find we want something more along the lines of XenForo.
We have automatic updates turned off for this reason 
On the other hand, I can look at and play with the source code of Discourse, while doing this with Xen is not trivial. Yes, the Docker containerization is somewhat opaque, but that’s why if you’re developing Discourse, you’re better off running it on bare metal. Docker is great for running it on a production server.
Sk89k already has a XenForo license, I think.
It’s not an issue with the cost of the license. From what I’ve read elsewhere on these forums, they either already have a license or are more than able to purchase one.
It has been stated by some of the forum staff that the original intention was to try Discourse at first and if there were any problems, migrate to XenForo. Some of the staff have apparently taking a liking to Discourse and are not seeing a large enough reason to change over.
Sk89q did say there were some things he didn’t like about Discourse, but he has also said that he rather enjoys the Suggested Topics that Discourse provides.
In regards to the suggested topics and some of the other features of Discourse, I think it is working fine in the stage the community is at right now, just mostly developers from the bukkit, forge, cauldron and spigot communities talking and clarifying / hashing out things about the Sponge API.
Right now, any user can see all the threads when they first join and can jump in and provide an opinion about something. On the other hand, when we need a forum software that will both handle the developers, server owners and players asking about plugins and coding. With discourse I think that will be a bit overwhelming has there could possibly end up hundreds of people on the forums talking at the same time.
I think XenoForo will be able to both handle the load that this will cause and organize it in a fashion that is more friendly to new users (anyone can use a forum software after getting used to it, we gotta focus on the noobs) as most people in the minecraft community are used to XenoForo or some other very similar software. Also, I don’t know if I just haven’t found it or it doesn’t exist but I cannot figure out how to make a spoiler which is extremely useful for threads focused on code debugging.
Personally, I like Discourse. I just think it is missing out on a few things XenForo has.