Ah the DOS days of the Telegard Hack BBSES one of the most popular being Renegade BBS. Though do recall PCBoard that had it’s own script programming language, Amiga and Commodore 63 bbses. Fun days.
I have been fortunate running Discourse on Ubuntu LTS. If a Plugin install didn’t go right typically minimum issues with a simple remove/comment out the plugin line…once in awhile though yes may need to rebuild twice if it failed.