Around 5 years back, I wanted something like question answer type site/android app for my local community. I wasn’t in position to spend much. But I wished something like helping forums. I tried finding developers/helpers on Freelancer.com etc, but they asked me around INR 50k to 100K.
And so I spent many days googling. And I thank God that I happen to stumble upon ‘Discourse’ as luck would have it.
I was really astonished to find that on Discourse when somebody answered to an existing post, then viewers of that existing topic weren’t required to even ‘Refresh’ the page to see the newly added answer. (and the concept of try.discourse.com was something that I never had seen before) I really tell the truth, I was very much astonished to see all this, and that too ‘White Labelled’. To me, such a ware must’ve costed many lakhs, as I think.
Finally, it really needs too-too much-much courage and determination to offer something like this not only free, but white-labelled. At least I can’t come even to close something like this, even at my level.
Edit1: After getting a few views of this reply of mine, I’d like to add one more thing, which I think is equally important, if not more. The discourse volunteer community. And out of this, one star above all, is Pfaffman Jay (I deliberately didn’t make it a link to call him here). 5 years back, when I was building MY site, he used to give so much of his time and his expertise to every asker, without any concrete gain to himself, that few other people can. And since he is helping people on this meta even today, I can presume that he has a helping gene in his body which few other have. To me, had he (and 1 other person, whose identity I forgot now) wasn’t there, I couldn’t have upped my ‘D’ site and had left in first one month only (wordpress setup seemed far far more easier to me in the beginning). And I’m sure there would be hundreds of more souls like me, who’d have quit with Discourse, if such help wasn’t available to them on time.