Discourse + Digital Ocean Review

Discourse can upgrade itself with one click in the admin panel. Not the same can be said about MyBB, or most other forums.

Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do.

Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.

Discourse has a simple user trust system that makes moderating the forum a lot easier. Users gain more permissions as they gain more trust, which limits the amount of damage spammers and trolls can do. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded StackExchange, which is the gold standard for gamification/moderation systems so you can also expect Discourse to get better and better at moderation.

The best feature is its design: discourse is designed to aid in the creation of high quality online conversations. Flat discussions with well implemented quoting systems, expandable/collapsible replies, infinite scroll, clean UI and many more features come together to form a highly polished forum experience that makes legacy forums show their age.

Discourse is powered by Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. The code is licensed under GPL and available on GitHub.