Online forums have been around almost as long as the Internet. But few designers have tried much in the way of making them sleeker, clearer, and more modern. Discourse, the forum platform by Stack Overflow's Jeff Atwood, is trying to do just that. While Discourse functions much like any other forum, it has incorporated bells and whistles that most people have come to expect from social media sites. For instance, Discourse uses categories that feel like tags, rather than an endless list of unrelated hierarchies. In addition, readers can filter categories to read what they want to read; they can also post, reply, and edit their forums. Importantly, unlike other forums, Discourse works well on mobile devices and tablets. In a nutshell, Discourse is a fairly typical forum, but with some more advanced possibilities.
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