StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Jeff Atwood wants to improve the entire internet. That’s always been his goal. He started by co-founding StackOverflow, a question-and-answer site for software developers that revolutionized the way they learn online, and eventually this evolved into StackExchange, a network of Q&A sites spanning myriad topics.

Now, Atwood has renewed his crusade with Discourse, an open source application for building online message boards that he hopes will become as ubiquitous as WordPress. Complaining that forum software hasn’t changed in the past 10 years, Atwood and his co-founders Robin Ward and Sam Saffron set out to re-imagine what forum software should look like.

With social networks, blogs, microblogs and Q&A sites like StackExchange and Quora, do forums still matter? Atwood certainly thinks so. “Forums are the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet. But they matter,” he wrote on his blog. “To this day I regularly get excellent search results on forum pages for stuff I’m interested in. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t end up on some forum, somewhere, looking for some obscure bit of information. And more often than not, I find it there.”

At first glance, the Discourse demo site doesn’t appear to be a radical departure from existing forum software. But there are several tools that set it apart, including forum threads that can be ranked by popularity; a “best of thread” view, which shows the best reply to a particular thread based on unspecified factors; and “aggregated links” view, which displays all outbound links mentioned in a thread, plus how many times they’ve been clicked.

Behind the scenes, there are several other tools for moderators, including the ability to split, merge, lock or archive any topic. There’s also a community moderation system based on “increasingly levels of trust,” but only a few layers have been implemented so far: new user, non-new user, and moderator. More layers, and a badge system, are coming later, Atwood promises.

Discourse is open source, but Atwood also co-founded a company to develop it, following the classic open source model: The software is free to use and install, and the company will sell hosting and support. The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from First Round, Greylock, and SV Angel.

Discourse is aiming for ubiquity, but unlike WordPress, Discourse is built on the Ruby on Rails programming framework. Although Rails is a popular choice among developers, it’s not as widely supported by web hosts and it’s more difficult for lay users to deploy applications. As Atwood himself has admitted in an blog post railing against PHP, a big part of why PHP is still so popular today is that it’s very easy to get a PHP app up and running.

“If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option,” he wrote.

Atwood hopes that Discourse can help Rails apps become easier to deploy. “We hope that we can popularize Rails to better approach the ‘it just works on every server everywhere’ PHP ubiquity,” he wrote on Hacker News. But for those not interested in setting up their own servers, Discourse will eventually offer one-click paid forum hosting.

Discourse is enormously ambitious, but it’s still early days, and the team admits that the software is not yet ready for prime time. In fact, the company doesn’t recommend anyone ditch their old software yet. “We believe Discourse currently makes the most sense for new discussion communities,” the project FAQ reads. “In some rare cases communities may have a discussion platform that they intensely and actively dislike, to the point that they are willing to throw the whole thing away and start over.”

They may be old fashioned, but forum applications like phpBB, vBulletin, and Vanilla are well established and have gotten many forums this far. But it’s clear that there’s room for improvement. Discourse as a long road ahead of it, but at the very least it should shake things up for the old guard.