Is Discourse a suitable forum for Monzo?

I’ve seen discussions about whether Discourse is the right choice of forum for the community. Personally, I think it works quite well. It has a certain casual feeling that I like.

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I love it, I think it’s the nicest forum software out there. No one will love every choice, but it seems in this case the complaints relate to moderation and spam filtering. All forums have something like this, and it’s very necessary. You wouldn’t want to use a forum without it…

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I think this works well for Monzo’s personality.

I personally work with XenForo a lot, so you’d think I’d be biased, but I do quite like this UI :slight_smile:

Liam

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Discourse is great! Much better then PHPBB thats for sure.
Again, it all depends on how people use it.

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Anything is better than PHPBB…

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I think Discourse is good for general discussion, though I’d prefer something like https://excel.uservoice.com/ for ideas & suggestions.

I’d argue not vBulletin… but that’s as much for political reasons as any.

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Its the best I’ve ever used - probably part of what motivated me to get involved here - very low friction

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Well, vBulletin was a good software… not anymore though. No one should use vBulletin 5.

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Fair, it’d be more fair to say vBulletin got ruined…

I remember experimenting with PHPBB… :joy:

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Forget it all! Let’s go back to Usenet! :joy:

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I think SMF is pretty good. It’s really easy to learn for people posting on the site. I have not used the site admin tools so I can’t comment on those.

Discourse is great on desktop. On mobile, I’ve found it gets very sluggish, especially when you scroll back and load more than a few posts in a thread. IMO, Discourse is too JS-heavy, and far more bloated than forum software needs to be, hence the sluggishness on mobile (on Android anyway, don’t know what iOS is like). But to be honest, I think that’s true of a lot of web sites that have turned into full-blown web apps unnecessarily.

Feature-wise, Discourse is decent, and it does look nice. I think it’s perfectly suitable for Monzo from that perspective, but maybe not from the perspective of a company for people who spend their lives on their phones.

It used to look absolutely terrible by default. I haven’t used it in like ten years though - pretty crazy to think about that!

No issues here on android :man_shrugging:

What browser are you using? With Chrome on my Nextbit Robin running LineageOS 14.1, I find Discourse extremely fast and light.

Yeah your right there. I (hope to) think they have fixed it’s appearance from then. On desktop and on mobile it’s fine.

Usable for me using Firefox on a Note 8. Though I have noticed loading longer threads can be slower.

Interesting. I normally use Firefox on my Moto G5 plus - I downloaded and tried Brave (basically reskinned Chrome), Edge, and Opera to see if they would make Discourse more usable, but none did :frowning: