Have you used Discourse?
After I looked it up, I started recognizing it everywhere. Has anyone else here built a thriving community with Discourse?
I've been getting very excited about this robust, open-source platform that takes a Wordpress approach: you can self-host your own entirely free version or pay for their hosting expertise ...regardless, YOU own your platform.
Check out Understanding Trust Levels in Discourse
This blog post completely completely opened my mind to starting a forum-based community over a real-time chat like Slack/Discord. I'd love to hear from active community managers. What do you think?
I’ve used Discourse in the past a few times, both as a community member and admin. A few well run communities I’ve been a part of as a member include:
As well as other varying sized communities and masterminds. The biggest problem I have with discourse is the feature bloat / cruft in every aspect of the app. It takes hours to go through all the admin settings and then you end up forgetting how to get back to certain things.
I'd rather be focusing on delivering value to the community.
I do run a few discourse installations and can't recommend it enough. If you're moving an existing forum from something more old style some users might complain about the changed UX but at the end they all loved it so far. If you run into any issues, don't hesistate to ping me. Maybe I can help.
Great to hear!
Thanks for the offer
I'm using it to host my scooter community. It's awesome. So many features. It's definitely an upgrade from the old phpbb3 I used to host a long time ago.
You can customize at a very granular level, like how often a person can post in a row in their own post. Because there are so many configurations, it might take some time to get it just the way you want, but it's all worth it.
You can see it here at https://totalruckus2020.com
Oh, I'm self hosting on digital ocean for $10 bucks a month.
really fucking love
discourse! the active installation is here (with a bit of customization): http://thebitcoin.pub/it was a big part of our story in the beginning as it helped us grow and build our community and project!
patreon did a feature on us and our implementation once: https://blog.patreon.com/monetization-strategies-bitcoin-pub
Oh wow, thanks!
This is a great example of a post-critical-mass community
well, we started with just a youtube channel... crazy, right?!
I have seen this used in several places. I think the first time I saw it was in the Twitter dev forums. Then I think I saw @8bit using it for one of his projects a few years back.
It's a great concept--and I do love me some Open Source, self-hosted software.
I think the big challenge with every forum app/software I've ever used is the UI/UX is often terrible, and difficult to adjust to for people who aren't already used to that type of forum structure.
Personally--I can't stand the way those types of forums work. But I know many people love them and are used to them.
the UI/UX is definitely bad on many of these forum-like softwaresssssss.
but, sometimes, it doesn't matter.
Exactly. High-quality discussion is an oasis of value in the noise factory of the web. I totally understand the UX irritations, but I'm okay with a higher barrier-to-entry if that means I'm filtering for the people that are serious & value this quality.
i have to +1 this comment!
We have an active one at Ministry of Testing.
It works well!
I'll have to check this out.
Any examples of successful community you saw built on Discourse?
I contemplated using them but I was kinda priced out.
Priced out of ~$5/month self-hosting?