Discourse

[GSHamster]

Jeff Atwood (guy who made StackOverflow/StackExchange) and his team released his new forum software, Discourse, today.

http://www.discourse.org/

Since you're doing the whole rebuilding Enworld thing right now, might be something worth taking a look at. StackExchange was very well built, had high performance, and its design was excellent for its target market of Q&A sites.

If Atwood has done the same thing with forum software that he did for Q&A sites, this might be another option rather than rebuilding Enworld up from scratch.

(Or it might be terrible, I haven't actually tried it. But StackExchange has built up enough credit with me that I thought I'd make sure you guys heard about this.)

 

[Morrus]

We're (already) using the latest version of vBulletin and its associated CMS and compatible mods.

 

[GSHamster]

Right, and I totally understand that.

But Atwood put a lot of thought into exactly how you get the best possible answers on a Q&A site, and StackExchange reflects that. It was not just a slightly improved version of what came before, it was a leap forward.

Whereas vBulletin is essentially the best version of a forum that was designed a decade ago. It's possible that Discourse might be the same "leap forward" for discussion sites.

I'm not suggesting that you switch right away or anything like that. Just that I think Discourse might be a tech that is worth exploring and playing with.

 

[Morrus]

Right, and I totally understand that.

But Atwood put a lot of thought into exactly how you get the best possible answers on a Q&A site, and StackExchange reflects that. It was not just a slightly improved version of what came before, it was a leap forward.

Whereas vBulletin is essentially the best version of a forum that was designed a decade ago. It's possible that Discourse might be the same "leap forward" for discussion sites.

I'm not suggesting that you switch right away or anything like that. Just that I think Discourse might be a tech that is worth exploring and playing with.

Sure, it may well be. At the moment we're using D&D 3.5 with access to a thousand third-party-publishers and a heavily invested campaign setting. This would be like jumping to a new system which isn't compatible with our campaign setting, and has little to no 3PP support.

And also Los of the new stuff it says on the site it can do can be done easily with vBulletin mods already.

It may well gain those things over time, and then it will be awesome -- hopefully at that time it'll come with a conversion system, too!