One Open Source Project Runs So Many Web Forums

Fun fact - Discourse allows you to make posts and send and receive private messages via email, which combined with email notifications allows users who prefer mailing lists over forums to use it in that way pretty seamlessly.

Parker

_Thank_ you for telling me this software's name! Nobody ever puts the software name in a colophon or anything, I thought I was going insane

FourOf

When you said "forum" I immediately thought of phpBB, because I've encountered it a lot more often than discourse.

mrsansiverius

tbh, I don't think it's necessarily bad when FOSS projects do this, at least when it comes to actually offering a real web product using their code.
Musescore kinda does this with their Web end for sharing music sheets, which does have a subscription cost.
But the program itself is FOSS.

AshnSilvercorp

For a second i thought youd talk about phpBB... man i feel old

Andoresu

Unfortunately the biggest forum of all, Reddit, is not open source.

thingsiplay

Wait, so are you telling me that they don't write a forum with the backend code in x86 assembly with WASM?

brunothedev

I started recognizing discourse everywhere, after I was peer pressured into setting up an Instance myself...
And every time I die a little inside, because someone had to set it up. Sure, they might have had an easier time with it than me, but if you don't have root, it is a pain. Especially if you need to migrate some selfbuilt Forum to discourse....

herkulessi

another project i was shocked to find out was open source was canvas, the learning management software.

majoryoshi

Discourse is developed by the same guys that make Stackoverflow :)
Jeff Atwood was on Lex Fridman's podcast, worth a listen

motionthings

From the thumbnail, I thought you were going to talk about 'DejaVu' fonts. 😁

RealMazharHussain

All those PHP based forum softwares used to be used a ton, people just slowly drifted away a bit. Upgrading some of those was a huge pain too, but they ran on shared hosting so…

EraYaN

I was a Netflix support rep in 2014 and their internal CS site used Bootstrap. I can detect Bootstrap pretty much anywhere.

DrewWalton

I got to disagree on the hiding part - any somewhat savvy person will check the menu, and if it's not there, check the footer. Also, an interesting tidbit you missed: Discourse was created by Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of Stack Overflow.

jandorniak

Forum software are free because they are so easy to write. :-) I wrote them a lot in different languages. If you write it like a brain dead ape you can monetize it, because only the main developer is putting in the time to understand the code.
Shop systems are even worse. Code so bloated and convoluted that the shop server goes up into smoke if more than ten people are using it at the same time.

boelwerkr

Knew about it and think they document how to deploy it via docker but I mean there are a handful of FOSS projects with the same system, Gitlab and Sentry from the top of my head

heroe

4:52 is so funny if you pretend that "BB" means "Baby" in a seductive way.

MyAmazingUsername

If I didn't like Discourse before, telling me it's used by EA and TeamViewer is one way to make sure I hate them.

AlucardNoir

I really like Discourse for being so powerful, so I'm happy that many projects use it, but it's sometimes pretty heavy and slow too. I guess it's a fair tradeoff

quazar-omega

Discourse is by far one of the best forums I've used. So many others like PhpBB and Moodle forums are just plain awful to use.

miguelguthridge