question2answer vs discourse ( a better replacement?)

Question

I am sure many of you are looking for a better open source discussion forum script

I can across discourse and wonder if any of you tried it?

https://meta.discourse.org

https://github.com/discourse/discourse 

1. discourse is on ruby on rail while question2answer
2. discourse is backed by a much larger community of contributors while question2answer has one major contributor 
3. discourse has APIs which makes it possible to create native apps

I must add that I never installed discourse as I still love question2answer but seems to me that question2answer  is no longer in active development 

Any of you could compare the two?

Answer 1

I tried Discourse before deciding to use Q2A. My main reasons for not using Discourse were:

• Discourse (like all other Ruby-based applications) is a pain in the rear to set up and maintain if you don't want to use Docker, because the dependency hell in Ruby is nothing short of insane. It took me 3 days to get it running whereas with Q2A it was literally 10 minutes, as promised in the docs. If you're interested feel free to read my blog post about my experience.
• As the name suggests, Discourse is more geared towards discussions than actual Q&A, so it's more like a web forum. From what I saw it also does not allow downvoting posts, which is a feature I definitely wanted.

Comments

I was thinking about Anspress, Vanilla and Q2A. I made decision to go with Q2A.

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Thank you Ansgar
No wonder I did not see any selected best answer for any of the posts at the discourse forum. It does not have that feature



I have been using Q2A for a long time now, however very often I needed to develop an app but lack of API endpoints made it impossible

My worry is that Q2A is almost retired and no active development
At the same time I dont like Ruby and would prefer Python for the backend of such script

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@Amir Cmpe

 1. What features do you "need" that can only be provided by a native app?
 2. Regardless of the lack of an API, are you 200% aware of all the server changes that you will need to perform in order for the features from the previous item to be operational?

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@Pupi1985
1  the main reason I need API is to hire someone to wire a web service for me that users could created their own private sub QA forum.

2 I am not fully aware of server changes.  I know that the feature C that i mentioned above will lead to creation of additional tables (forums table, a user can be a member of multiple forums) and a coupe of columns to be added to the existing tables, a new page for creation of some forums by users with special right of forum creation.

That's basically all

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What do you think Pupi1985?

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I hardly believe any QnA software will allow you to create sub-QnA forums out of the box. What I am 100% sure about is that you don't "need" a web service to do so.

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would you be interested in custom writing such a plugin?

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No. No plugin can solve that problem, actually. That requires significant changes to how Q2A works (the core). E.G. currently all users are part of the same Q2A installation; you can't make them be part of a sub-forum or something like that

Answer 2

It is real that the development of Q2A is slow. But it is up to each administrator to be able to modify it to your liking and thus continue generating interest in users.