As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.

> can anyone recommend any decent forum engines

I've spent (way too much) a lot of time on forums built using xenoforo, though I'm not sure of what's the stack underneath and what was built-in and what had been added by the operators.

Discord feels like this generation's forums (and Reddit).

what's wrong with PHP/MySQL? I am not into web tech, so genuine curiosity.