Discourse Blog

I'm sorry it was difficult to get Discourse up and running!

If it helps, I'd be glad to throw in a free Digital Ocean $20/month droplet -- I can set it up following our guide at http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/ and then hand it over to you for everything else. We also have a special Mandrill reseller code so we can give you a Mandrill account with 50k emails/month as part of the package. Just email us at team@discourse.org and I'll make it happen.

(Obviously I am a fan, because PHP fractals, man.)

Yes, this will require Docker, which means a 64-bit OS and a modern Linux kernel. We initially tried supporting arbitrary Discourse installs but it quickly became a support nightmare for our small 7 person team. We adopted Docker because we saw it as the only way forward to have sane support both internally (for hosting) and externally. We are all-in on Docker, for what it's worth.

I'd argue Rails has historically had very little incentive to support super easy server installs; how many large open source Rails projects can you even name? Certainly 37signals nee Basecamp isn't too concerned about how hard it is to install their webapps on a server...

Long term, the only real solution is VPS and Docker. I think that has a lot of other benefits for the whole hosting ecosystem, too -- it opens the door to not just Rails deployments but all kinds of alternatives.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-discourse/127129

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-better-together/

Disclaimer: I work at Discourse, so I'm totally biased :p

We use a Discourse for:

- Support, feature proposals/discussion, bug tracking at https://meta.discourse.org/

- Commit reviews https://review.discourse.org/

- Shared inbox for email support

- Company planning at an internal instance

And we see a growing need for better tools for company collaboration. It's even greater if you work on a distributed, remote team that spans dozens of timezones like us. Chat doesn't cut a discussion that can span months, years. Or when you want to actually put tough into an argument, bringing paragraphs, links, multimedia content, etc.

We have a few blog posts about it:

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/03/how-does-team-discourse-use-discourse/

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/04/effectively-using-discourse-together-with-group-chat/

And a new one coming soon about teamwork.

In any other venue, I would 100% agree and would not have responded this way. Delvarworld's tone is totally mild and in keeping with typical internet culture.

But Discourse's goal is to raise the bar. Significantly. They blog rather eloquently about it http://blog.discourse.org/2013/03/the-universal-rules-of-civilized-discourse/

And new topic posters are asked to keep that high standard in mind when posting. I'm sure his sarcasm was meant lightly, but it still deviates from the high quality of discussion I'd like to have, and rather than simply ignore a discussion where I was specifically invited, I opted to publicly explain why I wouldn't be participating.

What I failed to do, and this shows my failing to keep that high bar, is explain what we could change to make the discussion civil.

I imagine the Stackoverflow guys are familiar with Linux architectures, they also run the open source forum Discourse[1] which is a Ruby on Rails app that comes with a recommendation to set up and develop in a *NIX environment[2].

Certainly the point is to use the right tool for the job, and I wouldn't dismiss your final comment: having a team proficient in .NET is a great reason to build your tools with/for that platform.

But no, I don't think it would be fair to reply to this article saying "Why didn't they build this for [my preferred language]?"

[1]: http://www.discourse.org/
[2]: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/discourse-as-your-first-rails-app/

Disclaimer: I work at Discourse. We discuss all our work on an internal Discourse forum, it makes everything much easier to track and long form slow lane discussion is encouraged and baked into Discourse.

We also have chat built in now, with a strong emphasis on interoperability between chat channels and topics so discussions can be easily moved between the fast and slow lane. I love the way we work and I always feel like communicating with the rest of my colleagues is seamless.

The blog post on our recent 3.0 release goes into this more if you are interested https://blog.discourse.org/2023/01/discourse-3-0-is-here/