I mentioned all of this
the last time the topic was raised (and
the time prior to that), but I might as well say it again. I've used Discourse on a number of sites, and it is horrible. Worse, the person primarily responsible for it, Jeff Atwood, refuses to listen to bug reports and advice, and has a habit of banning anyone who criticizes the software at all - constructively or otherwise.
TBF, I am far from unbiased on this. My experience with it was from when
WTDWTF (warning: NSFW doesn't even begin to cover it) used it, and were its testbed site - which, if you know both the Daily WTF's rampantly toxic fora and Jeff Atwood's egotism, made for a volatile mix. They didn't mince words about its flaws, and quickly gained Atwood's enmity - on the Discourse main forum, he gave a blanket ban of everyone who had ever had an account on WTDWTF. He was also known for a number of Richard moves on the WTF site itself, and again, getting that group to say someone is over the line with their bad behavior is itself a remarkable accomplishment, give the level of vitriol that is SOP there.
That ended almost three years ago, and they
still excoriate Discourse on a regular basis. They have a whole
Discopaedia (NFSW, again) thread just to list their terms of abuse for it.
Mind you, they did come up with NodeBB as its replacement, which in many ways is
"Discourse with fewer bugs and a semi-sane development team" (Still NSFW - and trust me, when
Ben Lubar beats you in a sanity contest, that's bad; he's as crazy as I am). It shares some of Disco-Horse's advantages, and several of its flaws, but unlike with Dis-Curse, they actually listen to bug reports. Since the worst bug in Discourse is Jeff himself, this accounts for a lot.
To
quote myself quoting myself (yet more NSFW) on this topic:
To me, that's the real pi--er about the whole D--ksores debacle. Discourse really did have the potential to be an improvement over existing forum software as it existed in 2007. It was ambitious, it took risks, it had some real thought put into it. The problem wasn't the design or the implementation (well, not the main problem, anyway, both had some serious problems but most could have been fixed or removed eventually), it was the messianic attitude Jeff developed while creating it. After his involvement with SO, and the mild popularity of his CodingHorrors blog, he concluded that he knew forum software and moderation better than anyone, and he was determined to sail right into that iceberg - bug reports, jellypotatoes, and server cooties be damned.
Adding infiniwhine [InfiniScroll] to [Discourse] was one of Jeff's best ideas. Making it mandatory was one of his worst. Even as a default setting, it is likely to p--- more people off than it would please (though informing users of it and getting them to try it if it isn't the default is tricky), but not giving any choice at all was a disaster.
And again:
To be fair, Jeff did care, he just had a very different idea of what 'works' means; assumed that the majority of bug reports were whining rather than actual bugs; put his vision of 'civilized discourse' over all other considerations; and just generally treated the users with a high-handed contempt that was anything but civil. [...] Jeff Atwood is pretty much the physical embodiment of one of Perdition's paving stones. His good intentions took him straight off the deep end into fanaticism.
Now, I have no idea if Ducksauce (probably the least vile of the nicknames they WTF folks gave it) has improved much since then (which was from 2010 to 2016) but from what I have seen of it elsewhere, nothing has changed - at least not for the better.
I wince whenever I see that a forum supporting something I need information on uses it. We need to avoid it.