Discourse – Bringing civilized discussion to the Internet
Being Civil
© Lead Image © Svitlana Martynova, 123RF.com
The open source Discourse framework modernizes bulletin boards and online forums with live updates as you read, providing never-ending scrolling, community moderation capabilities, heuristic spam blocking, special layouts for mobile devices, and more.
Let's face it: Internet forums have not improved much since the heyday of Usenet in the early 1990s, and when web-based forums came along, things got worse, not better. Say goodbye to threaded discussions, killfiles, cross-posting, uuencoded binary attachments, and many other wonderful features that had worked their way into the newsgroup-based technology over the years. Now, say hello to pages and pages of unstructured lists of messages, clunky interfaces, and endless, unreadable, unwrapped lines of text. All because, you know, the web.
Now Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow fame), Robin Ward, Sam Saffron, Neil Lalonde, and Régis Hanol have decided to change all that. Meet Discourse [1], a framework that drags forums kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
With an interface (Figure 1) slightly reminiscent of the defunct Google Wave (now Apache Wave – equally more or less defunct), Discourse has the lofty goal of bringing civilized discussion to the Internet.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.