Hello,
I’m Filipe Russo, the major translator from the portuguese open-sourcing of Discover Meteor and the Famo.us Meetup organizer from São Paulo - Brazil, but still… I (and my fellow pt-br Meteor Devs) wonder why did the Meteor Core opt for ‘out-sourcing’ the task at hand to foreign web technologies (according to wappalyzer) instead of an in-house solution? Why not favor a Meteor version based in a (heavily, if necessary) modified version of Telescope just because they have been supporting the platform since (correct me if I’m wrong) alpha days? I thought this together with the AtmosphereJS packaging ecosystem would be the pattern from the 1.0 milestone onwards but I guess I was just plain wrong.
Wappalyzer Screening Result
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Hi Filipe,
There was large discussion thread on the old group.
Most people seems to agree that it’s better to use Discourse at least for now.
Telescope is not really a discussion forum and it would require a lot of effort to push telescope to the state where Discourse is already.
Honestly, I’d rather prefer MDG focusing on Galaxy and improving meteor than being distracted by building forum software (IMO).
And if you compare it to google groups (which is foreign tech too btw) this is just miles ahead.
Cheers,
Maxim
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Make it a hackaton effort instead then, we just held a Meteor Games hackaton in Germinadora not more than a month ago.
I’ve followed parts of discussion and also asked if Telescope was too simple. Guys said Discourse is much better for a forum. I’m still searching the outstanding benefits for me as simple user. Everything seems so equal except that we are promoting Ruby on Rails.
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I think the most important things already have been said with the exception of one thing:
In the former discussion about this topic on the Google Group the community effort was always put in front. I think there’s no reason not to take this effort only because MDG has chosen to go with Discourse now. Why not start to develop a platform based on Telescope (or even from the Scratch) with Meteor now? I think MDG will totally be willing to switch if a solid solution is ready.
Until then from my POV there’s no solid solution around and as @tpaktop already said i’d also vote for MDG concentrating on Galaxy and the further development of Meteor instead of coding forums.
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In hackathon usually people make prototypes and toys, a discussion forum like this isn’t something you make in 24h… https://github.com/discourse/discourse
With Meteor you could reimplement it, Telescope is something similar for a different target, but probably is better to implement something new than reinvent the wheel (See: Wordpress alternatives stories)
I like the diversity MDG is showing here. That goes with the simplicity expressed in Meteor principles.
Then we have another Telescope. I don’t think we want to reinvent the wheel. Just use some available plugin/framework.
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It would be awesome to start a forum project in Meteor. Aim to be a Discourse-killer! If people are passionate about it then maybe in a year or so it could replace Discourse here! 
Discourse has paid a lot of attention to details, especially the social and behavioral details, so the bar is pretty high and there’s a lot to learn from, but I think there are definitely things that a Meteor-based app would improve on like live updates (of course) and better understanding of what has actually been seen and read.
Plus it’s great to have more open-source Meteor app examples.
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We did have a big discussion about this. Obviously I would’ve loved for the community to pick Telescope. It would’ve required a lot more work to bring it up to Discourse’s level, but that work would’ve benefited the community.
Then again, Discourse is great for discussions, and there’s always Crater.io for news and links. So maybe both sites can coexist peacefully, and Telescope can keep improving in parallel.
That being said, if anybody wants to build a forum in Meteor I would strongly suggest taking a look at Telescope first. 80% of the features you’d want are already there, it’s extensible and customizable, and there’s a growing community around the project.
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While I agree that I too would have loved these forums to be written in Meteor, would it have made the forums any more useable, or with any better features? Or would it simply have allowed us to put a stamp on a Discourse clone, that said “Build with Meteor”.
Everyone seems in agreement that Discourse has set the bar pretty high, it’s working really, really well; can’t we just not reinvent the wheel when the only purpose of doing so seemingly, is to make out of something different?
Personally, I’d much rather MDG/keen developers focus on improving Meteor as a framework, (whether that be core, tools, packages, etc.) than re-writing a piece of software when we already have one that does the job just fine.
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Personally I agree to used Telescope even its not full feature. At least in made by meteor.
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Why does it matter what our forum is built with!? Your counter arguement is simply:
At least in made by meteor.
What does that matter if the user experience isn’t anywhere near as good? This just makes me think we’re fully prepared to ignore the old addage: “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”
Following your logic, we should stop using all of our text editors / IDEs, as they aren’t built with Meteor and, they could be (but at what cost I wonder to Meteor’s development…)
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@Siyfion I am entitle with my opinion 
To answer your question. I think telescope is good to be used daily basis. Ok tell me what is a show stopper of telescope that stop us of using it as the default forum?
Its just like saying better use ROR than meteor because its complete, lots of features and stable. Just my 2 cents
Of course you are entitled to your opinion, however that doesn’t mean I can’t comment on it 
I agree that there probably isn’t a “show-stopper” feature missing from Telescope. However, it does lack a lot of the features that Discourse has; some of which are the reason why the community as a whole wanted to move from Google Groups to this in the first place!
I wouldn’t agree with your statement about using Ruby on Rails instead; it is more complete, it does have lots of features and it is mostly stable. But it doesn’t have hot code pushes, reactive data sources and reactivity baked-in (to name a few) that is why Meteor exists. That’s also why I am keen to keep Meteor development progressing at a good pace; I want to see it become as complete and stable as RoR, but they aren’t going to get to that point if they have to stop to build an entirely new forum application that does the same as an existing one, just so they can slap a “Built with Meteor” logo on it.
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It would be great to make a clone of discourse for two reasons.
- Show how much better the code base is (one language, less lines of code, etc…)
- People can read the source code and learn tricks from it (full text search, image upload, etc…)
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Line of code comparison isn’t useful for forums scenario, new features are being request all the time that can grow into complexity and require high availability. I guess Telescope is a much better system that those general purpose forums.
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Yes, but consider how much time it would take cloning all of the features. Are those two benefits worth it?
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May be instead of arguing about discourse, we should list and prioritize what features are missing in telescope to make it good enough to take over. This will be a good start for the telescope team to know where they shall heading.
IMHO Meteor needs some flagship general purpose application to reach people beyond the Meteor community. A forum is a good one because this is the kind of service deployed on nearly every web site.
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Bad about forums is they keep dealing spamming posts, depulication is need. Unwanted ads or scam ads is a messy business, I would let it done in PHP and this issues will brings the wrong impression that Meteor isn’t capable of preventing rouge or bot commenters.
So far, I have no love for any forums except HackerNews.