Because this is coming from nim and nim design goals are to be efficient and elegant I can not help but notice the excessive bloat. The main forum page is 4MB of data (~700kb compressed) to basically communicate 3KB of information (plus avatar images which should not be more than few kb total anyway).
This is still better than original Discourse which for this same thing needs 6MB of data (1.2MB compressed). However Discourse does not claim to be efficient or elegant.
This kind of web performance engineering attention to detail will go a long way. The benefits for users on slower connections are particularly important. And as an engineer, showing few KBs of information with few MBs of data should bother you. Your information to data ratio is less than 1%. Excessive reliance on JS does not help. The best way to think about JS is as a feature enhancer not a feature requirement.
See also: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Having said that I think it is absolutely great that you are doing this and I hope we can get efficient and elegant forum software. This will certainly help nim adoption if executed in the way that is true to your values.
Edit: A competitor has been mentioned in comments:
https://fluxbb.org/forums/index.php
They are showing similar amount of information in "only" 100KB of total data. And 80% of it is CSS (which does seem excessive for what it does, I am sure 5KB of CSS would do the same job taking that page to amazing 25KB of total data).
This is still better than original Discourse which for this same thing needs 6MB of data (1.2MB compressed). However Discourse does not claim to be efficient or elegant.
This kind of web performance engineering attention to detail will go a long way. The benefits for users on slower connections are particularly important. And as an engineer, showing few KBs of information with few MBs of data should bother you. Your information to data ratio is less than 1%. Excessive reliance on JS does not help. The best way to think about JS is as a feature enhancer not a feature requirement.
See also: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Having said that I think it is absolutely great that you are doing this and I hope we can get efficient and elegant forum software. This will certainly help nim adoption if executed in the way that is true to your values.
Edit: A competitor has been mentioned in comments:
https://fluxbb.org/forums/index.php
They are showing similar amount of information in "only" 100KB of total data. And 80% of it is CSS (which does seem excessive for what it does, I am sure 5KB of CSS would do the same job taking that page to amazing 25KB of total data).