I discovered Discourse on HN and played with it all day. So far it looks promising.

• freshing and distinctive UI
• high profile blogger promotes it.
• haz all the basic forum functions
• community based moderation
• deadly easy distribution and (promising) install methods.

something I think yet to improve

• Does the system converge?
• The "branching" topic feature seems very creative, but how about cross-site, federated branching? e.g. X-post to another site, but aggregates contents
• a viable channel for viral marketing. It would be nicer if provided with controllable spreading and feedback statistics
• digest and archiving
• interop with maillist, NNTP, etc.

Few rants about Stackoverflow. It's obvious that Jeff Atwood started this project by inspirations from Stackexchange sites, and I had some pretty bad experience recently, interesting topics are closed by hi-rep members for either it's off-topic or asked the question in the wrong way. This makes an active community dead. Hi-rep members should have some karma-recycle or reputation-TTL system to make sure they don't abuse their powers. Or they will corrupt as their momentum accumulates, they will transferring the state of the community to an irreversible way.

Also it's a pity that they chose Ruby on Rails over Python, I guess it's trending that Python going too enterprizy and RoR is more kind of "quick 'n dirty" in its nature.

Overall I am exited with Discourse, but still yet to see how it goes on

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