NetNewsWire Moves to Discourse

I think this will increase the longevity and accessibility of the information going forward.

Accessibility is questionable. "Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high."

@vintner I find that frustrating as well. At least there’s now a hidden way to read Discourse without JavaScript. Presumably, the Internet Archive will scrape it now. In any case, Slack was much worse and required logging in.

One of the problem with Slack is that its archive only goes back so far unless you’re paying for it (and I wasn’t).

Slack pricing appears to be over $5 per user per month (as far as I can tell), and the group had hundreds of users, and so there’s no way that paying for it was an option.

I did save a copy of the NetNewsWire archive, but it includes nothing older than February 2024, which means the first five or six years are just lost.

(I’m not going to publish that archive, because everyone posting there had the expectation of the semi-privacy and ephemerality that Slack provides.)

It's a hideous, bloated monstrosity (client *and* server side) but at least it's not Slack (!!!???) and it still has "Mailing List Mode", which allows you to read and reply to threads so long as you quote using BBCode/MD, and you can only start new threads if you have the correct list address for a forum, which may or may not actually be configured.

And the ten years are almost up.

@Brent Yeah, I agree that the archive should remain private.

@Sebby Which forum would you recommend?

@Michael Beats me. Unfortunately, perhaps more owing to its mailing list mode than in spite of it, it does seem to "fit the bill" pretty well, in most cases.

I suppose there's Mailman 3 or Sympa, if you want to start from a more mailing-list-first approach. But of course I can appreciate that increasingly that's just not the usual model for most newbies (still very big in the blindness community and for technical committees). Pretending that a mailing list is a forum is appreciably nicer for the users of the mailing list, though. Groups.io is a hosted service that exemplifies this approach very well, but it has stupid free plan limits and can't be hosted oneself.

@Sebby Yeah, despite ranting about it myself here, my conclusion after running Discourse for my own site (having previously used Mailman and vBulletin for many years) is that it’s distasteful at a technical level but in practice solves lots of different problems rather well. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious alternative that does things the way I’d want.

Has anyone made anything better than phpBB? Serious question. As far as I know, it's still the gold standard of forums, because I haven't really encountered any forums software that works better.

I agree on really disliking Discourse. Every time I go to a forums running it, I get irritated by how hard it is to find what I want and read through threads.

@Bri The core reading interface with phpBB is fine, but IIRC it doesn’t support friendly URLs and has lots of composition limitations (Markdown, images, WYSIWYG) compared with Discourse. There are plug-ins to do various things that should really be part of the core and then they break and get abandoned.

FMM the worst thing about Discourse is the "infinite scroll" behaviour that makes it all janky when you're trying to quickly find your position or just read the entire page without the network. If you could turn that off, and maybe inline all the JS (and/or make a JS-free experience available when failing over due to bad network/content-blocking/JS disabled) then I could probably love Discourse a bit more. But it shatters the dream of the semantic web and IMO is a pretty shitty standard-bearer for online discourse.

Technical people now have "public inbox", which is God's answer. But there's no use pretending anyone but nerds want that.

Xenforo is an excellent modernized take on the classic web forum experience, imo.

Critically, it's the underlying software that's modernized, not the well-proven concept of how an internet discussion forum should work.

@Michael > At least there’s now a hidden way to read Discourse without JavaScript.

It is the interface presented if accessing Discourse from a soon to be unsupported browser as Safari 15.

Wow, a lot of hate for Discourse here. I've been using Discourse for nearly a decade for the community forum for my software. Before that we used a Mailman based mailing list for a couple of decades. We also used Slack for about a year for a beta program. In my opinion, Discourse is a 500% improvement over any of these. Both email and Slack are entirely opaque to anyone not a subscriber, and all history is lost. Even if you are a subscriber, they are nearly useless unless you pay close attention to every post. Once switching to Discourse the engagement went way up - at least double, maybe triple. Because the search is excellent, we sometimes get engagement and discussion on posts that are years old but are newly relevant to someone (perhaps a new user that is just discovering the software). Our mailing list community was stagnating, but Discourse kicked the community into high gear ten years ago and it's only gone up from there. I know that some users consider the community there to be one of the big advantages of using our software. I've never had a single complaint from any user about browser compatibility problems, or really any complaints at all - only positive feedback (and about a year after starting the Discourse forum we ran a user survey which was very positive). I consider switching to Discourse to be one of the best decisions I've made in nearly 50 years of running a software company. So I applaud Brent for this, and it looks like it's already going well.

I think it's fair to point out that Discourse's tech stack isn't great, and a lot of questionable implementation decisions were made, which cause a bunch of problems an online forum shouldn't have. But I do think that the UX is nice, and it's much better than Slack or the cancer that is Discord.

I agree that Discourse is preferable to Discord or especially Slack. It's at least searchable and indexable. And of course phpBB is old and crufty at this point.

But for some reason, when using Discourse, I always feel stressed out. I'm not sure what exactly it is about it that does this. The infinite scrolling is certainly part of it, since that makes me feel like I'm constantly at risk of losing my place. But I think there's more to it than that. I've never been able to put my finger on it though.

But sometimes it's your intuition that tells you when a piece of software's UX is off or no good. And for some reason with Discourse it feels like it's fighting against me rather than working with me.

Does anyone know how to delete/terminate a Discourse account? I could not find a method when I looked.

I'm happy this happened. Not specifically about Discourse (I don't have an opinion there) but just that this information isn't holed up in Slack anymore.

@Bri It's just janky, and I suspect that's what you can perceive. The whole thing is a dynamic web app rather than typical browser interaction, which means that it gets into weird states when something goes a little bit wrong, and everything just feels slow and unoptimised. No doubt having nice, fast-loading UI with rich editing features is all very well, but it comes at a cost.

@NaOH You can usually find the option in your profile. Account menu, Preferences.

Thanks, Sebby. That's what I would expect, and I'm pretty certain I looked there when I sought this previously. Double-checking now, I see no option to delete/terminate an account, only an option to log out.

@NaOH Ditto, I just checked my TidBITS account, and sure enough, no option to delete account there either (only to hide profile). They're using their own authentication backend (which also controls the email addresses you can use). OTOH, my Cloudflare Communities account does have this option. I suspect this is all under the control of the host, unfortunately.