Framework is growing steadily, but I have always felt that the Discourse platform has been rather restrictive as far as its features and capabilities. Primarily, my main issues with Discourse are:
- It’s strictly a forum. There are no other features included, such as static pages, wikis, or anything of the like.
- Narrow column view, which is unsuited for tables or any other wide content.
- A lack of thread types. For instance, the What should we build next? thread could be a good candidate for a thread type that allows voting on comments.
My personal suggestion would be XenForo. I have used IPS but with their removal of the plugin marketplace, the community has become much more fragmented. XenForo has a few features that make it a really flexible tool, especially for communities like this.
- The base framework has both static pages and forums.
- The forums can have different board types. So for instance, you can have a suggestion board where each post represents a new suggestion and users can vote on that suggestion. The board can be configured with rules on whether to allow downvoting and it also allows posts where voting is disabled (for announcements posts and such).
- Edit time on posts is configurable, anywhere from not editable to a certain number of minutes/hours/days to unlimited. This really helps with duplicates, especially with the built-in search feature when making a post. The What should we build next? thread has a handful of phone suggestions even in the first few posts, likely from people who hadn’t bothered reading comment history and just suggested a new idea. This is fine but it leads to other suggestions getting lost simply because they aren’t seen. XF would allow a single thread for a phone suggestion and comments on that suggestion aren’t intermingled with every other suggestion and question and comment.
- Wiki threads are not built in but are available via plugin. There is also a dedicated Wiki plugin which I am willing to donate my license for which adds a new dedicated wiki area. There are several times here where users have asked for a user-editable wiki to curate content, and this may be a good place to do so. This can also be configured so that particular user groups are the only ones which can create or edit pages in the wiki, should there be any desire to lock it down.
- The official resource plugin is a good place to allow community-provided guides which complement the official guides. For instance, in my USB-C/Thunderbolt Dock Megathread, I had made a post describing how to fix an audio issue on Fedora. This sort of content would be good as a resource.
- Very large plugin library contributed to by the XenForo community, which can extend the community features even further, should this be desired.
I am more than willing to assist and provide guidance should this option be evaluated.