Poll: Stick with this forum software, or choose another?

Your opinions are important! What do you think?

I happen to like this Discourse system very much. I honestly don’t know what else is available out there that would be notably better. From an end user point of view it seems solid. Have you done any testing regarding moderation of posts and members, or any spam fighting?

Thanks for the feedback, Mike! I’ve tried five different packages, and while Discourse isn’t perfect, it’s been far and away the best. The only two I threw out right off the bat were vBulletin (ancient) and Vanilla (what MFP uses.)

I have indeed been working with moderation tools and anti-spam. There’s a very good set of tools for moderation. I’m still studying its API for integration/SSO/etc… I like the library of plug-ins available, but I especially like that I can write my own, should an esoteric need arise.

Regarding spam, even this test instance multiple anti-spam tools running and has quietly fought off over 16 posts from India on this system already. New users are generally pretty limited to how many posts / images they can enter early on, and no system will ever fight off 100% of manually entered spam by humans, but this far it’s pretty resilient against 'bots and commercial entries. (I’ve had the ‘Greasy Burger’ account try to spam everything from Big Macs to Viagra and these cloud-based x-reference tools are pretty good.)

I just didn’t get a “Oh, this is a slam-dunk” feeling and needed to see what other technical users thought. So thank you for your evaluations, they’re awesome!

Totally unreleated but something I’ll never understand with MFP is why they run completly unencrypted, especially when they take credit card numbers…

I haven’t run anything that takes user input without a valid certificate since 2006, even this test instance is secured. Oh well, it’s one of the many reasons this system is online.

I’m really looking forward to finishing putting these components together and seeing what will be!

That’s great information, George. It really sounds like you have found a great package for end users and admin alike. The fact that you can write your own plug-ins sounds awesome. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. It’s clearly leaps and bounds ahead of MFP. I’m really excited to see the rest of your hard work.