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.
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