We’re mulling over whether we made the wrong call using ‘discourse’ in our URL. Yes the word has a relevant meaning, but in hindsight there were better and more obvious options. There are plenty of examples of accepted uses of product names as DNS records, plenty of orgs still run their webmail at exchange.corpname.com - the big difference of course is that the users are employees, they’re told where to go, choice and interpretation or meaning aren’t a factor. We’ve been using optimizely to A/B test alternatives in our site navigation and ‘community’, ‘forum’ and even ‘meta’ score higher than ‘discourse’. Maybe once Discourse develops a reputation beyond the community this will change. The stats we’re seeing from this test suggest that we’ve almost stunted the growth of our community by using a fancy word. I think the question (and lesson) is to know your audience, if they’re a cerebral bunch who really really understand the use of the term, it might be an ok signpost. If you’ve any doubts whatsoever it’s probably wiser to stick to a more conventional alternative. It’s my fault of course, as a big user of the boards at omnigroup it felt quite logical at the time. Now we have to consider a DNS change, new SSL cert and updating a whole load of WordPress database entries. Yuck.

Sounds like a thursday afternoon where I work… It’s not as bad as it looks on paper- a few days time at the most. How much ranking has accrued on Google etc. – SEO loss is much more of a hassle to fix. If people can’t find you, people don’t visit.

in general I feel like using discourse is not a great choice for your subdomain name. I usually prefer forum, discuss or community I really like discuss its usually my first pref, cause its a bit of a call-to-action.

Pick your DNS name wisely

Product Support Self-hosting

Stephen (Stephen) 26 Julho , 2015 23:23 3

We plan to use Cloudflare for redirection, but yes, SEO is another casualty of the move.

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Domains, Sub-domains, & TLD Community Building	14	1749	13 Agosto , 2020
Is it OK to use the word "Discourse" in the name of our Discourse-hosted discussion board? Product Support	4	2665	9 Junho , 2015
Install discourse as a subfolder? Product Support	1	518	18 Setembro , 2020
Switching forum from subdomain to sub directory Product Support	10	4507	25 Março , 2018
How to run discourse on subdirectory of external domain? Self-hosting unsupported-install	23	6349	13 Dezembro , 2019

Pick your DNS name wisely

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