My earlier review in the Hubitat thread:
>software
It suffers from ajax overload, glitzy features, and mediocre nav ui, but the content is worth the pain.
Add poor advanced search parameters to the above. Can't figure a way to add a negative search parameter.
That aside, the software grows on you --particularly some UI features while creating a post.
Besides Hubitat, I believe Samsung is also using Discourse for Smarthings. If I were looking for a commercial or enterprise forum, it would be a contender.
Personally not keen - seems too focused on most recent discussions only, regardless of context.
Am very much a fan of Xenforo, though it's closer to old skool while integrating nice new features (most recent is Push Notifications as an alert option): https://xenforo.com/community/
I've been wanting to switch to Xenforo for some time. But I keep hanging on to phpBB because I know it so well.
The phpBB community suffers from poor moderation and casual rudeness. I saw a thread there a few years that was a little old but had the wrong answer for how to do something. So I popped in and contributed a better way to accomplish it. A mod came by and removed my detailed post, saying that the thread was too old. That made zero sense. If the discussion's too old then effing lock it.
I hung on to vb3 for a long time before moving to Xenforo. It was more a forced move and XF seemed the least worst choice. I'm really impressed with the functionality they've built into it, though, especially the frontend options via mods.
I cannot stand xenforo. I'm sure it could be fixed with a theme or template or whatever that platform calls it, but ones I have used are all so bulky and blocky with huge amounts of wasted space everywhere.
A hobby site I used switched and I don't visit any more.
>huge amounts of wasted space everywhere.
That's also a problem with Discourse.
I've been tempted to minimalize it with Tampermonkey (like I did th3core), but have put it off.