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Add to SafariWhen comparing Discourse vs Genview3d, the Slant community recommends Discourse for most people. In the question“What are the best collaborative decision-making platforms?” Discourse is ranked 3rd while Genview3d is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Discourse is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Has a built-in immune system from trolls, spammers and bad actors
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.
Pro 100% free and fully open source
Discourse is powered by Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. The code is licensed under GPL and available on GitHub.
Pro Modern & polished UI/UX with lots of great smaller features
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.
Pro Helpful community
Discourse has a comprehensive forum culture support hub at meta.discourse.org.
Pro Hosted and self-hosted solutions
You can host it yourself in a $5 cloud server or on any Linux server you already have. And if you don't want to deal with this, you can use the hosting platform from the development team.
Pro Live preview while editing the post
The post editor has a synchronized side-by-side preview of the Markdown rendering of the post.
Pro User selectable themes
Users can choose between the themes made avaliable on their instances, and even use different themes on different devices (mobile vs desktop, for example).
Pro Export your posts
Pro Effective search
Pro Good to go out of the box yet infinitely tweakable
Discourse has sane, safe out of the box defaults, but a million dials and knobs to tweak.
Pro Easy one-click upgrade
Discourse can upgrade itself with one click in the admin panel. Not the same can be said about MyBB, or most other forums.
Pro Advanced JavaScript app
Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.
Pro Discussions can be organized in categories and tagged
Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do.
Pro Official Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin
Official Akismet plugin vets posts by new users to make sure they don’t look spammy before they hit your site. Akismet key purchase required.
Pro Extensible via plugins
Pro Good on-boarding experience for new users
New users are greeted withe the disco bot which has an interactive experience to teach the basics of using Discourse.
Pro Supports multiple types of data sources
GenView 3D can connect to multiple types of data sources such as ERP systems, SAP, XML files, Excel spreadsheets, Web forms, live streams, webcams, PPM, ticketing softwares, IoT, and many more.
Pro Runs on SAP HANA's latest version
Pro Can easily contextualize information
GenView 3D can add an extra layer of information this way allows the user to contextualize the information.
Pro Show processes and assets on a map
Cons
Con Complicated setup
Compared to standard PHP+MySQL apps, Discourse is more complicated - the app lives in a Docker container. However, a Docker image is available, which reduces the setup time to about 30 minutes.
Con Leaves out users with shared hosting
Discourse requires sudo, which is only available on a VPS.
Con Bad noscript support
When using a Discourse forum without scripts the experience is greatly reduced. It's really hard to use and is read-only, meaning that one can't comment or create threads without scripts.
Con It is more "Free to Try" than really free
Discourse is open source free software. The hosting is where the costs come in. Discourse.org hosting starts at $100/mo, but you can pay as little as $5/mo on Digital Ocean or other cloud hosts.
Con Extremely expensive hosting
Official discourse.org hosting starts at $100/mo and supports the team creating the software. It can also be hosted on a cloud service like Digital Ocean for $5/mo.
Con This is proprietary Service-as-a-Software Substitute
This is not software that the user can be in control of, it's Service-as-a-Software-Substitute, that locks users into a single instance of the software running on the company's servers. No source code is available at all, let alone under a free code license that would allow users to set up and migrate their data to their own instance if they became unhappy with the company's service.
