It's not fair that you can't see anything good about Discourse just because of the JS requirement. That's just one handicap.
It has its good points and all of its current features can be implemented (and already has in other projects) with HTML fallback in PHP. But I feel the biggest problems Discourse is attempting to solve is sociological, not software based. Whether software can fix human nature is another topic altogether.
Full disclosure: I don't use Discourse and don't plan to any time soon. I still believe any site/forum worth it's salt should be available via wget so that rules out most web apps (I don't believe a forum should be a web app).
It has its good points and all of its current features can be implemented (and already has in other projects) with HTML fallback in PHP. But I feel the biggest problems Discourse is attempting to solve is sociological, not software based. Whether software can fix human nature is another topic altogether.
Full disclosure: I don't use Discourse and don't plan to any time soon. I still believe any site/forum worth it's salt should be available via wget so that rules out most web apps (I don't believe a forum should be a web app).