Copy and paste of our entire readme on Github:
Discourse Readme
Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a:
- mailing list
- discussion forum
- long-form chat room
To learn more about the philosophy and goals of the project, visit discourse.org.
Screenshots
Browse lots more notable Discourse instances.
Development
-
If you’re brand new to Ruby and Rails, please see Discourse as Your First Rails App or our Discourse Vagrant Developer Guide, which includes a development environment in a virtual machine.
-
If you’re familiar with how Rails works and are comfortable setting up your own environment, use our Discourse Advanced Developer Guide.
Before you get started, ensure you have the following minimum versions: Ruby 2.3+, PostgreSQL 9.3+, Redis 2.6+. If you’re having trouble, please see our TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE first!
Setting up Discourse
If you want to set up a Discourse forum for production use, see our Discourse Install Guide.
If you’re looking for business class hosting, see discourse.org/buy.
Requirements
Discourse is built for the next 10 years of the Internet, so our requirements are high:
Browsers
Tablets
Phones
Safari 6.1+
iPad 3+
iOS 8+
Google Chrome 32+
Android 4.3+
Android 4.3+
Internet Explorer 11+
Firefox 27+
Built With
- Ruby on Rails — Our back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully in JSON.
- Ember.js — Our front end is an Ember.js app that communicates with the Rails API.
- PostgreSQL — Our main data store is in Postgres.
- Redis — We use Redis as a cache and for transient data.
Plus lots of Ruby Gems, a complete list of which is at /master/Gemfile.
Contributing
Discourse is 100% free and open source. We encourage and support an active, healthy community that accepts contributions from the public – including you!
Before contributing to Discourse:
- Please read the complete mission statements on discourse.org. Yes we actually believe this stuff; you should too.
- Read and sign the Electronic Discourse Forums Contribution License Agreement.
- Dig into CONTRIBUTING.MD, which covers submitting bugs, requesting new features, preparing your code for a pull request, etc.
- Always strive to collaborate with mutual respect.
- Not sure what to work on? We’ve got some ideas.
We look forward to seeing your pull requests!
Security
We take security very seriously at Discourse; all our code is 100% open source and peer reviewed. Please read our security guide for an overview of security measures in Discourse, or if you wish to report a security issue.
The Discourse Team
The original Discourse code contributors can be found in AUTHORS.MD. For a complete list of the many individuals that contributed to the design and implementation of Discourse, please refer to the official Discourse blog and GitHub’s list of contributors.
Copyright / License
Copyright 2014 - 2017 Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.0 (or later); you may not use this work except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License in the LICENSE file, or at:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
Discourse logo and “Discourse Forum” ®, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
Dedication
Discourse is built with love, Internet style.
Copy and paste of http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
bettermotherfuckingwebsite
This is still a motherfucking website.
And it’s more fucking perfect than the last guy’s.
Seriously, it takes minimal fucking effort to improve this shit.
7 fucking declarations.
That’s how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece. It’s so fucking simple and it still has all the glory of the original perfect-ass website:
- Shit’s still lightweight and loads fast
- Still fits on all your shitty screens
- Still looks the same in all your shitty browsers
- The motherfucker’s still accessible to every asshole that visits your site
- Shit’s still legible and gets your fucking point across
And guess what, motherfucker:
You never knew it, but it’s easy to improve readability on your site. Here’s how.
Let it breathe
Look at lines 1 and 2 of some shitty website you’re building. Assuming they’re not married they probably shouldn’t be humping. The defaults are trash – pick a minimum line-height: 1.4 for body copy. Headings should be tighter. If you can’t see that…piss off.
If your text hits the side of the browser, fuck off forever. You ever see a book like that? Yes? What a shitty book.
A little less contrast
Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life? Tone it down a bit, asshole. I would’ve even made this site’s background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn’t so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines.
Size Matters
I know your partner says otherwise, but it’s true. Bump that body copy to render close to 16px or more. Smaller type works well for print, not the screen.
Line-width, motherfucker
Looking at an LCD screen is strainful enough. Don’t make me read a line of text that’s 200 fucking characters long. Keep it to a nice 60-80 and users might actually read more than one sentence of your worthless dribble.
Yes, this is also fucking satire, you fuck
I love what the creator of this site’s inspiration did. What I’m saying is that it’s so, so simple to make sites easier to read. Websites are broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible, but they’re also fucking ugly. You and all the other web designers out there need to make them not total shit.
“You’re a fucking moron if you use default browser styles.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Epilogue
Inspired by the geniuses behind motherfuckingwebsite.com and txti.
This page—that isn’t a total fucking eyesore—was created by me with help from him.
OMG this is so cool!