About the UBER forums...

A very outside thought from someone who knows little about forum software:

http://www.discourse.org/

Looks very clean, easy to use, and seems a bit more modern than a lot of more conventional forum software. I don't know how customisable it is, but I expect that will be a key goal.

It isn't full release yet, but the devs are looking for partners from diverse forum backgrounds, so Uber may be in an advantageous position. If not, the project is entirely open-source so Uber could just grab the latest version from their repository. However, dealing with in-development software has it's own quirks (that i hope many people here are familiar with by now), so it may not be appropriate.

Either way, it's probably worth a look at.

Discourse is the worst thing ever.

is it like the Open Office of forums?

I'm really enjoying the well reasoned points here, made in the form of a concise and well informed argument.

I don't think the critic was well informed there, on both accounts, as open office (and libre office) are two great pieces of software.

It has infinite scrolling, which is something I hate. The rest of it seems fairly unnecessary as well but maybe that's just my neo-luddite senses saying that.

Imo, it doesn't do anything better than traditional forum systems, but it has a lot of annoying features, like the scrolling.

Why the fear of addressing me/us directly?

I'll alter what I said a bit. OpenOffice sucks when you compare it to MS Word.

anyway, I'll stop. Open Office isn't relevant I guess.

The thing about continuous scrolling is that it seems like one of those things where people complain because it's different, and not because it is somehow fundamentally inferior. I can imagine the hypothetical case whereby a forums had gone down the continuous scrolling route from the start, then when some new system implements pagination, just as many people complain about it.

To be clear, I'm not unilaterally defending Discourse. There aren't enough forums it's been used on for me to form a full opinion. However, I do find it un-constructive when people just say "It's bad", without saying why. Why is it bad? Can you justify the difference between a bad feature, and an unfamiliar one? What about it reminds you of open office, despite the fact that open-source does not necessarily mean that a paid for supported option is also available?

Ironically, for a suggestion of looking into a forum design which claims to promote intelligent discourse, I've seen very little in the way of logical discussion on it, other than "It's Bad".

I think you misinterpreted my question about Discourse as a statement about Discourse...somehow. Or perhaps you thought I was the one that said Discourse is bad. Who knows? I know nothing about Discourse. However, Open Office is just a headache. My fiance and I make a living off of self-publishing. I started with OO and soon found out how bad it was when comparing it to MS Word. It can certainly do almost everything MS Word can do, but instead of one click, there's 5 steps you have to look up. The most recent annoyance I came across was that OO kept forgetting to load a Spell Checker. I'd set it to English (US) and after a few uses, it would revert back to not have a spellcheck library selected at all. It also screws up formatting. I'm sure you could find more examples pretty easily. I now use a combination of MS Word and Scrivener and would only ever recommend OO to someone who didn't want to spend any money at all.

Anyway, the fact that they've already named what forum platform they've chosen leads me to believe they've done their research, and suggesting something different at this stage would be futile.

Our XenForo work is already well underway, so it's also a moot discussion.

This version of phpBB is almost 6 years old, and is in serious need of replacing. Updating to the latest version would have been as much work as building a new site, so we decided to look for what was the current most popular and usable site. XenForo pretty much came out on top.