What are the advantages of Flarum over Discourse?

BlackSheep

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

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:

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.

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.

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"

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.

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?

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.

d1a8lo24

There are certain server requirements to run Discourse which are usually higher than most applications required. Now imagine the speed of Flarum on a machine with the same specs as what Discourse requires or more and adding the right cashing mechanism through htaccess and reddis like Discourse. You can end up with a really speedy application.

Now there are a few visual aspects that I like about Discourse and hopefully I will see in Flarum but the mechanism is the same, post, update, like, rate, follow, bump, reply etc... Is how you display that information that makes it eye catching and want to try it.

So far my other option to Discourse was Vanilla but its themes are just not there and thats where Flarum exceeds, easy, fast, modern.

Best of all I don't need an IT department or an MIT degree to install it.

So yes its not fair to compare it since Discourse has a stability advantage and as many of its users say "it uses the latest of ruby, reddis, and posgres" since to them PHP is the ugly kid in the block.

Yet many of the top applications on the web and over 60% of websites use PHP.

Anyway out of everything all I can say is that I choose Flarum as my forum application for the following reasons.

Easy installation no command line needed.
Its FREE
A better visual layout than others
I want to concentrate on my community not learn how to configure, compile, install etc... on a server hell if I need to learn all these things I might as well build my own application that meets my needs.
It just works

fragicide

d1a8lo24 It just works

That's all there is to it.

Meow

d1a8lo24 You forgot FluxBB, or Flarum -1.0. 😿

cregox

I have just found out about flarum. Being a progammer* for over 20 years, a discourse user for over a year, having installed my own instance of it and helped a few others out there with theirs, I can give my biased first impressions:

I don't like how the editor have no keyboard shortcuts for simple things as bolding or adding links.
I love how the editor still offers a great real time view of source and rendered - to me doesn't matter if it's on top of on the side
The whole look and feel of flarium is really aligned with discourse. No big differences, but flarum sure feels faster and snappier - I would guess it's probably just way lighter. Something as small as 120kb ember javascript probably helps even in my mbp 2015 16gb ram.
Light settings are great. Search seem to work very well. Again, nothing too different from discourse.
Discourse can save your chat on the server, you can switch from mobile to desktop and hardly you lose anything you write there. This is something it should take some time for flarum to catch up (don't mistake it by your browser caching your form, which is far from reliable reason why I use Lazarus).
Discourse also have a great email integration I've never seen anywhere else. I doubt flarum can catch up any time sooner even than the awesome saving reply drafts above.
Being able to switch editing post to full screen is a very nice and simple touch. Would work great for my blog&forums thing if it had a preview in there too (but I need the keyboard shortcuts and buttons for mobile!).
Hated the "awaiting approval". Discourse have a better way, imho, of handling moderation in general. It's really awesome and open how it's done there.
Probably flarum (still) can't summarize / show post edit history / search in unloaded topic like discourse can.
PHP was a really nice choice. Even while I think node, python or racket should be theoretically better, there are the ups and downs for any of them and it's hard to really measure their efficiency until we get final products as well polished as this one.
Jeff is the big name behind Discourse, and he is big plus an awesome dude in general. Look for his blog. I'm glad to hear the very tiny bits I've heard from Toby so far, I'll definitely look up more about him as well.

TL;DR;
All in all, having seen many competitors out there (such as nodeBB for one I can recall the name, or google products which is still unreleased as forums for anyone to use, for just a couple instances) I can't wait to see what else Flarum will bring, and it went straight to the top of my unwritten list! 🙂

edit: link to much related post in discourse.

dorea

spasi PHP

Really, PHP? I was thinking it's fully made on top of JavaScript!

Cactus
Not, really. By https://bitnami.com/stack/discourse you can install it just in less than 1 minute!

Anyway, I'm still waiting for full rtl support by flarum to finally choose one.

jordanjay29

dorea Nope, Flarum is PHP on the core, with a JS client front-end. I can think of only one forum software that is completely JS, that being NodeBB.

cregox

Without knowing anything more about flarum, and after being quite faithfully evangelizing discourse for over 1 year now, along with loving and hating StackExchange for so long, I have to admit... Jeff is indeed an ass and discourse is an unfortunate product of his ego.

For that reason alone, I'll probably move to flarum about as soon as I see enough features. Even better if you can maintain a healthy relationship with those insanely crazy dudes from the daily wtf! ;P

Keep in mind that this is no small task for me. I did dive deep in discourse, even threw my blog in there instead of using squarespace. I also don't know how I'm going to do with existing data base - ideally I'd just make a static copy of everything and use github pages or something. 🙂

webeindustry

In all fairness, discourse is pretty easy to install. I like that flarum is less of a resource hog, but it will take a lot of investment in energies by a community of developers to catch up to what is already fully fledged features in discourse.

datitisev

webeindustry You know Flarum is in development still, and it is pretty awesome already!
That Flarum has not yet released a stable version can only mean one thing: more awesomeness is yet to come, with more features, probably easier installation, and more.

webeindustry

datitisev

I'm all for it, let's see how much can be done in 2016

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