BoingBoing.net uses Discourse for message board app

Discourse is new. It was released to the public in late 2012 or early 2013. It's definitely a new take on message boards.

http://www.discourse.org

http://bbs.boingboing.net/latest

Jeff Atwood comment at BoingBoing:

Discourse is a JavaScript app, so it actually sends very little down over the wire.

Once you have the Discourse JavaScript "app" cached in your browser, it is far more efficient than traditional HTML/CSS server based application, because it's only sipping down little chunks of JSON from the server to update the page, rather than reloading the entire shebang of a page every time you click.

Excerpts from the Discourse FAQ

Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today - both from a technology standpoint and a sociology standpoint.

Discourse is a JavaScript application designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum web browser requirements are high:

• Internet Explorer 10+
• Google Chrome 24+
• Firefox 14+
• Safari 5+

We do officially support Internet Explorer 9, but some functionality will be unavoidably broken.

Discourse was intended from the beginning for future high resolution displays and ubiquitous touch devices.

• Mobile Safari, iOS 6+
• Mobile Chrome, Android 4+
• Mobile IE, Windows Phone 8 or later

However, we have not optimized for small screens yet - so for now, the best Discourse experience will be on 7" or larger touch devices.

Discourse is 100% free open source software, now and forever.

We eventually plan to offer one-click paid Discourse hosting here, and dedicated instance sales to enterprise clients. But for now, if you want your own Discourse instance, get the code from our GitHub repository.

Discourse is a JavaScript application that runs in your web browser, using the Ember.js JavaScript framework.

The server side of Discourse is written in Ruby on Rails with a Postgres database, and Redis server cache. You can deploy Discourse on a virtualized cloud server (Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Azure) or on cloud hosting (Heroku, Engine Yard, Appfog, etc) wherever Ruby on Rails is supported. The minimum version requirements are:

• Postgres 9.1
• Redis 2.6
• Ruby 1.9.3

We also recommend a minimum 1 Gb RAM to host Discourse, though it may work with slightly less.

Discourse hopes to be to message board software what Ghost hopes to be to blogging software: new designs for the future that are built with modern technologies. Both provide or will provide their software as free, open source. And both will provide hosting services.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html

#forums