Features of Discourse-based forums:
- They are much easier to navigate.
- They are realtime.
- The process of making new threads presents the user with existing issues showing possible duplicate question and answers.
- Threads can be linked to other threads (similar to how GitHub issues shows referenced issues).
- It is easier to find topics in the overall list of threads without having to first choose categories, and threads can be filtered by tags.
- They have very good search functionality.
- Amazing plugins: https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin (though arguably listing them all in their forums isn't the best way to present them)
- @mention users to notify them of direct replies.
- Easy to quote by highlighting text, clicking on the "quote" tooltip.
- Use full Markdown in any comment, including syntax highlighting of source code blocks.
- Supports oEmbed (and more with plugins). This means we can embed codepen.io examples (or other things) in any post.
I'm sure you've seen the Discourse-based forums lately. They look like this: https://discourse.threejs.org
All the most modern projects are using Discourse now; it's simply the best forum software out there right now (in my opinion and that of many others).
It is open source if you want to host it yourself: https://github.com/discourse/discourse.
Examples:
- EcmasScript specs are discussed with Discourse here: https://es.discourse.group/
- Web specs here: https://discourse.wicg.io/
- MeteorJS forums: https://forums.meteor.com/
- Electron: https://discuss.atom.io/
- Docker: https://forums.docker.com/
- Codecademy: https://discuss.codecademy.com/
Discourse is simply just really good forum software!