Last year, I migrated a 200000 messages, 15 years old phpbb forum (a French unicycling community) to Discourse. The intent was to provide some modernity to our forum and get back the community that had left over the years (a lot of people went on facebook groups).
Regarding the forum activity, Discourse, unfortunately, hasn’t made any miracle. People stick to their facebook groups despite our efforts to grab them back! The forum activity is also very tied to this sport’s popularity which as decreased a lot from the mid-2000s and we can’t do anything about that.
Regarding the user experience, it’s a success. Natively responsive, modern interface, easy to post images and video… I think the users are content and to my eyes, there is no bad side to Discourse really. The only thing I could think of is that I prefer the Nodebb fading transition between pages instead of a loading icon.
I’m that satisfied that it is possible that I migrate another phpbb forum (also 200000 messages) to Discourse in the future (hoping that the current admins will take some time to study the subject).
Regarding my very personal Discourse experience, it has been very beneficial to me.
I didn’t know anything about servers and Linux and my Discourse experience led me toward this exploration. I’ve learned a lot.
Last year, I was among the winners on an official theme contest, which was pretty cool!
A few days ago, I was for the first time confident enough to provide help on someone’s broken Discourse installation and was at the end paid for it.
Discourse has made me learn technical stuff and I was eventually rewarded for this, so that’s pretty great.
So, an excellent experience overall.