Discourse away

If you are a programmer, the chances are that you visit StackOverflow at least once a day (if not, then you must be in the '90s and using your boxed set of MSDN DVDs for reference). I'm a huge fan of The StackExchange platform and all the work done by the team. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame was the co founder of Stack overflow and when he stepped away from it last year with this post, I was more than a little concerned about him retiring from the game.

Well - I was wrong. Yesterday he made an announcement about launching discourse by the same team. They intend to do for the forum format what they did for the Q&A format on the internet - Revolutionize it.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

• 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
• Feels great to use. It's fun.
• Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
• Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

Stack Exchange has had a major impact on my professional life and i hope discourse will do the same.

Forums suck, and have sucked for a long time. For example, one of the most popular forums, xda-developers, which is regularly visit to find solutions to my vast variety of android issues looks like this.

and

Let's see if discourse can achieve its aims as well as it did with SO