Hello.
This is my first topic on meta.discourse and I would really like to write about my opinion and the results of my first acquaintance with discourse.
Background
I should start by saying that I came across discourse relatively accidentally while trying to find a good forum engine for my purposes. And the familiarization stage went quite positively - in particular, I realized that it has well-implemented functions that I require:
- Webhooks
- Achievement system
- Rich ability to integrate with other services
- Interface modernization and much more…
To be honest, Discourse surprised me with its capabilities. And I am grateful to the authors for continuing to support this project.
First Problems
But unfortunately, it still has shortcomings that I discovered for myself, and because of which I could not continue to interact with discourse. If in order, then initially for a forum engine that I would consider suitable, I defined 3 rules:
- API management
- Convenient administration
- Ability to customize any interface to suit your needs.
And while Discourse is good with API and admin panel… When I delved into modernization, I was stumped.
The first “beast” that attacked me was the difference in Discourse versions and, as a consequence, the difference in ways of writing Discourse Components and Themes. Some used widgets, some Ember JS, some something else… This all caused confusion not only for me but also for the AI, with which I periodically tried to speed up my learning of Discourse - but because of the next “beast” the AI only confused me more…
The second “beast” is the lack of quality and rich documentation in readable form and in several languages. I would very much like the administration to pay attention to this as soon as possible. Yes, of course, I read topics about setting up and creating my own Discourse Components and Themes - but they did not give me the knowledge that was required to understand the architecture of Discourse. In particular, I stumbled upon this article completely by accident: Upcoming Header Changes - Preparing Themes and Plugins Which helped me understand why I was constantly writing code incorrectly on the beta version 
The difference in versions with the absence of clear and Detailed documentation is a sore subject for Discourse… Because their combination gives a significant negative comeback, which prevented me from using Discourse to its full extent. I extremely need to deeply modernize the appearance of the forum, and alas, the current “documentation” does not allow me to do this. Because of this, I am most likely temporarily saying goodbye to Discourse, but I will follow its development.
And the third “beast” is the relative cataloging of information about discourse. Finding this or that information, how to do this or that action, is extremely difficult. I would say it depends on your luck and knowledge of English. Otherwise, if you are not a “lucky Englishman” - then you will have to fiddle around for more than one day. This is exhausting.
And finally, my personal drawback to discourse is the use of only Docker (as the official installation method) . I am sure that for this statement I can catch a wave of hate, but still, I believe that such a product should have an alternative way of installation without workarounds. Sometimes I might even need to modernize existing docker image files - and because of the container constructor, this is extremely inconvenient to implement. Well, or I didn’t find the right way…
Conclusion
Regardless of the fact that Discourse has enough disadvantages for me not to choose it now, I am confident that in the future I will be able to choose it and use it for my purposes. Because I expect that the developers and administrators of this project will pay attention to the shortcomings of discourse (including those stated in this topic/article). Discourse is already a very high-quality project, in my opinion, but it still seems not to have grown to “common” use. But this is temporary.
Thank you for your attention to the article.
P.s. AI “Manus” was used for translation from Russian to English