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
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
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.