The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!
August 17, 2018
The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Discourse
Our organization has over 1300 employees and even more volunteer contributors. Discourse was used as a pilot project years ago and positioned itself in a more canonical position, turning it into the main communication channel for the whole organization. It has been highly useful to replace old mailing list software with an open source and user friendly experience which didn't alienate power users as they could continue use Discourse via its mailing list mode.
- User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
- Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
- Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
- Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
- Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
- Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.
- Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
- Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
- It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.