What are the advantages of Flarum over Discourse?

Franz

d1a8lo24 At the end there are probably more Flarum installs when Flarums beta was release than there are Discourse forums running.

That's probably not true, to be honest. :-/

BlackSheep

Franz Yeah... Lot of "pros" community are using Discourse. Even if as a UX Designer i feel like they are vomiting in their user mouth, but, eh, that's another debate.

as2ute

Franz Well, THATS about as honest/humble as you can get! ?
However, after running a Discourse instance on Rails for over a year I became very disenchanted come the end - hence finding myself here! I concur that the "my way or the highway" rigidity of the Discourse Devs. is extremely off-putting for anyone looking for a flexible longer-term forum solution.

It is fair to mention that I had no running issues with Discourse and the design is slick. However, it was such a more modern look, members had a tough time adapting (compared to 'ye olde style forums of old...) The lack of an WYSIWYG editor killed it in the end for my members (even though I personally don't like WYSIWYG as the forum starts to look messy and 'cheap')....

I applaud FLARUM for its lightweight, resource-economic foundation and agree that it is likely to become extremely popular once stable. Of course this then begs the question of "uniqueness" & "individuality" when FLARUM becomes the 'go-to' forum solution...

Wordpress integration is an obvious route, irrespective of whether FLARUM is a PAGE or separate SUBDOMAIN/Multi-site installation - And I think the devs. are right to hold back prior to launching a stable v1.0 product. Forum members are hard to find and are a fickle bunch. They will be very quick to moan and leave (in my experience). Stability and lightness is KEY.

I am confident FLARUM will mature into a much more flexible, easily integrated solution than Discourse, whilst mimicking the crisp, modern style Discourse was (rightly) praised for. Ultimately - We are all looking for a modern forum solution thats quick, dynamic and pleasing on the eye - but no matter how sexy FLARUM might be - IT'S GOTTA WORK PROPERLY!!!

Like so many others, I eagerly await the launch of the first stable version - and would much prefer a quick launch of a stable BASIC version, that can improve over time, over BETA versions with several more features that are problematic etc. We can all then 'go live' and add features with subsequent updates - in the meantime building a larger user base and attracting more dedicated FLARUM advocates.

THANK YOU devs. for all your hard work to date. It is quite apparent that like myself, there are many people here that are extremely grateful for what you are trying to achieve with FLARUM and admire your technical prowess.
10/10 ?

d

malayladu Fastest forum system I have ever seen

See NodeBB if you want to see fast. Discourse is also faster than Flarum. Do not let your passion for Flarum obfuscate some true facts.

Franz

d Discourse is also faster than Flarum.

Do you have some "true facts" to back that up, though? 😃

Kowlin

d I strongly disagree, I will defend NodeBB to death since I absolutely love the community and the software. But Flarum is just faster.

accalia

d Discourse is also faster than Flarum

in my experience this is not the case.

for one thing Flarum (and NodeBB for that matter) to my knowledge has never caused someone to write a website just to track performance of the forum.

Discourse has caused such a site to be created: https://servercooties.com/#graph

d

Franz I do not want to start a flame war. We tend to be biased towards what we love. Personally I do not run any forum, I only participate on them. I am just interested in technology and follow things that are new; Flarum (F from now on) is one of them.

Based on my own user experience, NodeBB has no match when it comes to speed. It is really hard to beat Redis and NodeJS. F is responsive, but often struggles to render, specially in longer threads, the blank "placeholders" show multiple times. Yet, F is new, barely a beta 2, and has some way to go. I foresee it is bound to get better.

PJH_

Kowlin I strongly disagree, I will defend NodeBB to death

We're looking to move from Discourse, and one of the potential problems we've noticed with NodeBB is the list of supported databases (only redis, mongo and level to save people looking them up,) none of which would likely be suitable for our forum.

Franz

d No worries. I was just (and am still) confused about your statement about Discourse being faster than Flarum. That might even be true, but:

there's no benchmark yet (comparing the two on the same server),
it does not confirm my experience, and
most importantly, Discourse wouldn't even run on servers that support Flarum; thus, most Discourse servers you will encounter are bound to be fast (in terms of pure hardware).

Taking my smartypants off now.

Kulga

d
Franz

I apologize but this is kind of useless quibble until as Franz said, they are both run on the same server.
Logically, you cannot run a fair benchmark until they are even. However, you can run a uneven benchmark
that favors one or the other to make a point.

I have a 512MB 2 core VPS. Logically, I should be at a disadvantage with half the needed ram. I'll be comparing it to the primary discourse try it site (which I assume has 1gb+ of ram)
To make it more even, I am clicking on a discussion with 1 post and no added graphics. Then I mimic this for my demo flarum (so it has similar content - which I actually copy multiple times)
There are a lot of reasons why this is not a valid test, so make your own judgements.
Summary:
~400 response time discourse
~180 response time flarum

Edit: Full disclosure - I run the Beta Breaker flarum site tested above and I have personally optimized it. Originally it was getting like 260ms or so and now I (as seen) get about 180ms. I think if you try this site itself, it will load at about 260ms. This kind of brings us full circle back to it's not just about the forum software, but a great amount is webserver config too.

luceos

Well let's see what performance we get using PHP 7 with Redis caching possibly thread/post/user.

BlackSheep

PJH_ The loading bar at the top of any nodeBB page drive me insane. The Youtube one too. God i hate those things.

d

PJH_ Redis is not really all in memory. I think it will scale just fine to handle your charade, (sticking tongue out).

Filed under: I don't know, therefore I am.

d

PJH_ none of which would likely be suitable for our forum

This one test has almost 24,000 posts. Not suitable for your forum?

PJH_

BlackSheep We've yet to find anything immediately suitable as a replacement.

Flarum's use of PATCH without a suitable fallback mechanism is one of it's current problems :-)

d Redis is not really all in memory.

I'm simply deferring to the more knowledgeable denizens of our forum on the matter ;-) One thing that was highlighted:

http://redis.io/topics/faq

Redis is an in-memory but persistent on disk database, so it represents a different trade off where very high write and read speed is achieved with the limitation of data sets that can't be larger than memory.

accalia

d Redis is not really all in memory.

We have noticed that yes,

d I think it will scale just fine to handle your charade, (sticking tongue out).

we have been testing it and we have manged, multiple times to cause redis to lock up entirely under usage modes varying from "about normal" to "unholy bot/spam storm"

Kowlin

d Well that test forum just proves my point of NodeBB not being the fastest. 😛

d

Kowlin we past the "fastest" portion already. I was asking @PJH_ about suitability.

dehbuff

flarum is free, and that's more than enough for me 🙂

Personally don't like the design of nodebb and double editor.

valgrid

I can use flarum with a flaky 30KB/s connection. Discourse not so much. I also like that you can scroll past unloaded posts. That is not possible with discourse as far as i know. You have to load all the comments in between immediately, because the software only scrolls to end of the loaded comments.

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