Discourse?

[iAdam]

Anyone here using discourse for managing a community? I see that it's now quiet popular:

https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Discourse

I'm considering using it, but want to hear from you guys

 

[Pete]

I have a mostly hate/hate relationship with Jeff Atwood, its founder. A few years ago, a forum I was on migrated to Discourse and Jeff and his team came onboard as moderators. This was a few years ago, so we were absolutely an early bug testing crowd.

We did not appreciate Jeff telling us how to run our community and actively moderating it like he owned the place. There are behaviours that he feels are inappropriate in forums and designed the software to accommodate -e.g. it really wants you to stay on topic, as “topics that don’t stay on topic are not civilised discourse”. So while there are nice features about making it easier to “reply as new topic” and topic to topic navigation, it’s not always helpful to have this rammed at you.

That said he appears to have moderated his behaviour since. But I don’t know if some of the less wonderful ideas are present, e.g. for “trust level 3”, you have to read a percentage of recent posts, like enough posts, have received enough likes and made enough posts. TL3 used to automatically grant limited moderation powers automatically, like moving topics, meaning this was possible to get without admin oversight at all.

It seems to have settled down in the intervening time, but honestly I haven’t had the energy to spin up a VPS (requires 1GB RAM just to get going) to see what it’s like now.

 

[rafalp]

(requires 1GB RAM just to get going)

1GB RAM is enough to run Discourse for years, unless you are one of those lucky few with very active forum.

 

[Pete]

1GB RAM is enough to run Discourse for years, unless you are one of those lucky few with very active forum.

My experience was on Discourse when it was quite new (5-6 years ago) and we were routinely giving it trouble on a 4GB instance. Then again this was at a point in a time where Jeff said silly things like “you can’t write bots against it” because something something JavaScript front end… to a forum full of very, very technical people.

I still remember the time we managed to DOS the entire server by running the container out of memory just with a few lines of markup. Or DOSing the server with a very long password.

I assume it’s gotten better since then.

 

[eva2000]

Anyone here using discourse for managing a community? I see that it's now quiet popular:

https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Discourse

I'm considering using it, but want to hear from you guys

Personally don't like Discourse but can put up with it for forums I frequent i.e. Letsencrpt, Cloudflare and Haproxy forums are all Discourse based i.e. https://community.cloudflare.com/ is probably my most frequented Discourse forum