Hello

I am fairly new here. I run a large online community which is based on Discourse. In comparison, the forum software used here feels really clunky and, I feel, is not really fun to use. I realize the integration with the CMS is good, and I used to see that as a priority as well (once had a WP + bbPress setup, which was a aughful forum SW). My view these days is that it is more important to have best in breed products rather than the tightest possible CMS integration. Of course, these are just my 5c. I am now running WP + Discourse, and the setup works really well for us.

In case the admins for this site are playing with idea of moving to Discourse, I am happy to share my experience in migrating to and running a Discourse based community.

lemmon wrote: … moving to Discourse…

Noooooo !
The most important is to own software …
vanillaforums.com or another like it … but pleeeaaaze no discourse.

Ok, I get you don't like the idea
Just for understanding, what do you mean by "own software"?

We are talking about Discourse, the open source discussion software based on Ruby
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)
In what setup/environment are you running Discourse?

What is limesurvey.org/forum missing the most?

Just to name a few from a users point of view (I can imagine there are many more from a mod/admin perspective):

Responsiveness
Speed
Onebox renedering of linked content
Mark text to create a quoted reply, ease of quoting in general
Keep editor open while browsing other posts/topics/pm
Live search, and search functionality in general
etc

It's just a question of polish and a generational one, I guess. Discourse is a modern js app, while Kunena is built the way forum software was built 10+ years ago. In other words, it's hard to just argument from a functionality perspective. I wasn't missing any functionality back in my Word Perfect days, but wouldn't go back to it after being accustomed to O365 or even the latest Libre Office. The same way I would not go back to phpBB, which we used before.

Anyhow, it is not my intention to start a forum software discussion war. I was just offering to share my experience in case Discourse was on the map. I run a 5K member 200K posts self-hosted Discourse forum, loosely integrated with a Wordpress site. We are currently integrating LimeSurvey hooked up to Metabase for analytics.

jelo wrote: We are talking about Discourse, the open source discussion software based on Ruby
…

Arg right, my error …

@lemmon : Ok for Discourse or any other Free tool (except i don't have any power here).

Quite hard to integrate it in our CMS. Already proposed this. Maybe we will have time to discuss more about this soon.

To be honest, I'd say the forum and its software is the smallest problem of Limesurvey. I would like to see more resources put into the software itself rather than into how polished the forum is.

I agree, the forum might not be the best choice and there are quite a few things that I don't like (one seemed to fixed lately - you no longer seem to loose what you have written in the quick response once you decide you want to move to the editor, because you notice that you need to include a screenshot).

But please, don't use any developer resources on the website or the forum in the next couple of months. We have lost too much time with that anyway and with other things like plugins for panel integrations that did not work, etc.

I think we will need to go full force ahead with the software, adding new features, trying to catch up with other software or at least don't let the gap get bigger. We can't rely purely on the fact that LS can be installed on your own server.

sorry, Lemmon, even if I agree that a better forum software would be nice, if it is between better forum software and new features and improvemens on the LS software, I would not want one "man hour" or even "man second" to be spent on the forum software.