Special thanks to Mike, Amy, Ryan, Odus, Courtney, CaptainLogic and Cynthia for providing invaluable feedback (what they liked and hated) on this test forum system. I wasn’t really sure if this was the right track, but they really helped out to hammer out the answer! Thank you so much!
This system will be coming down for a time while I personalize and integrate it into the rest of the system. In a couple months, we should be good to go!
Thank you again!
Awesome! Can’t wait to see the full deal!
Curious - which other systems did you test? There’s a lot of excellent forum packages out there. Simple Portal and PHPBB are a couple of my favourites. Was there something about Discourse that makes it easier to integrate into your other framework?
Edit: Oh - just saw the other post. Still curious as to the other frontrunners…
Other packages evaluated were Jive, Drupal, MyBB, MUUT, XenForo, Bukkit, PHPBB, and a few unremarkable others… Admittedly, I hadn’t tried Simple Portal.
The closest runners-up in terms of features were MUUT and XenForo, while Drupal made a strong showing, also.
Discourse does have a good API, and the security plug-ins are fantastic! The number of hack and spam attempts tried on this test system surprised me, but Discourse’s was able to handle all of them without issue.
But, there’s always room for change and improvement. If Discourse doesn’t work out on the full system, it’s just a module that can be pulled. ETL is one of my specialties, so preserving content shouldn’t be too big a deal.
I’m looking forward to seeing what it becomes.
Man, I’m behind the times, I haven’t heard of most of those! I remember something called Invision Power Board, I think that’s still around. One of my internet haunts, hydrogenaud.io, used to use it but it appears that they use Simple Portal now. It has hundreds if not thousands of users and works really well. Discourse looks pretty clean though. I’ve already started working on my replacement CSS for it 
(Which usually starts with removing almost all the padding from every element).
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