After thirty years of lurking on the internet, one of the first forums I landed in was the SaySomethingInWelsh Discourse forum, where the nearly invisible pale blue time slider baffled me for several days until I got the hang of it.
The other forum I’ve been active in for years is the cloudynights.com forum, which uses their own proprietary software, but it stands up pretty well to Discourse, despite being paged. They’ve built it around a lot of user feedback.
NaNoWriMo has been my most active Discourse experience, three glorious years before it melted down, precipitating me into starting my own private writing forum – which forum is my favorite forum, now.
With the invaluable help of folks here on Discourse Meta, it has made it possible for our small sub-community of writers to escape Nano more or less intact. Week two, and we’ve got all our favorite conversations well underway, it’s fabulous.
Since the meltdown, I’ve also joined a Discourse forum, writingforums.com, which has interestingly done quite a bit of work making their forum look and work like one of those clunky old ones with paged topics and cluttered real estate, and no way to get back the pale blue slider, I miss it badly. Also, you can’t see what topic you’re in when you get a few replies down the page! I mean, like, what were they thinking?? What they have done there highlights vividly what I am enjoying about my own totally vanilla forum.