Discourse: The future of discussion forums, especially for niche communities
The adoption will be slow because all changes in the world of online discussion forums are slow.
The non-trivial concerns from community owners and managers over a number of things, including forum migration and SEO (e.g. rewriting old URLs) will further slow adoption.
The resistance among some community members, especially among some community influencers will be significant and need to be addressed on a community by community basis.
There's a chance it could go down the wrong path or UX issues aren't addressed and the forums are too complex to use for a significant percentage of users.
But I really believe that Discourse will be the future of online community forums, especially for niche communities.
Discourse is an open source Ruby on Rails project started by Jeff Atwood, one of the co-founders of StackOverflow.
Eventually, they plan to offer a hosted option. If the hosting is flexible and reasonably priced, this is when I think adoption of Discourse will explode. Having your discussion forum hosted for you is a better option for most online community owners/managers in the long run so their focus can be on their community instead of the regular problems that arise from self-hosting. The frequency of these problems increases as your online community grows.
So long vBulletin, IPB and any other similar style forums. I've had a 15 year relationship with you and owe much of my success to you, but you're not innovating, leveraging your power to slow progress in general (vBulletin suing xenForo) and it's time for you to fade into memory. It will take many years, but it's going to happen, even if I'm completely wrong and it's not Discourse that replaces you.
