Discourse is the right platform, but it can be hard to digest at first.
I watched a 20-year-old community launched with MyBB/phpBB-style forum, migrate to XenForo when XenForo launched, and then recently it finally migrated to Discourse last year. When they switched to Discourse, about 90% of users were unhappy. There were complaint threads for nearly a year calling it “garbage.” But after that, the complaints stopped.
Discourse has a slightly steep learning curve, and once people understand it, they calm down.
XenForo is a great platform, but it has reached saturation, there’s nothing truly new happening there and the development is stagnant.
Discourse, on the other hand, is modern, powers countless communities, and is genuinely future proof from a features standpoint. It’s free and open source, just look at the
GitHub contributions. Launched in 2014, and now with over 60,000 commits, it’s a solid, actively developed platform, with so many contributors.
I went all in on learning Discourse, and after using traditional forums for nearly 20 years, I can confidently say it’s bleeding edge. It makes SMF and XenForo feel like relics of the past. That’s because it’s built fundamentally differently, it doesn’t strictly follow traditional forum conventions. I was confused at first too, but once I got the hang of it, it completely blew me away.
If the Discourse team had wanted to build just another traditional forum, they could have. But their vision is different, and that’s exactly what sets them apart.
It's fully customizable, with themes and stuff and owner can tune it in variety of different ways.
The mobile app experience is as simple as saving the site to your home screen it becomes a PWA app, which works just like any other app with full push notifications and app-like behavior. The post composer is excellent, showing real-time previews of your content. There’s so much good stuff that it can’t be listed in a single post, people really need to try it for themselves.
The sad part is that many people give up during the learning phase. If something worked for them for years and now requires a bit of adjustment, that’s often where things fall apart. You just have to approach it with a bit of optimism.
To make this bold move, forum owners need to look beyond current member sentiment, because members will always cling to whatever already works. No matter how many polls you run, most will gravitate toward the familiar “what works now is fine.”
But once you hand them the sports car and they learn the controls, the majority end up happy.
Because of what I’ve witnessed, this is not an easy move. The fear of the community falling apart is what ultimately stops most owners.
If this forum ever switched to Discourse, there would need to be clear onboarding videos explaining how it works and why the traditional model is deprecated. The first thing people do is try to use it like a classic forum, and that quickly becomes frustrating for them, because it isn’t designed that way.
The right approach is to begin with the will to unlearn old habits.
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