Well, I just keep it updated, and donāt use a lot of plugins. The only two I use are discourse-affiliate (which unfortunately only does Amazon-links, and not even UK-ones) and retort. I do have the standard ones enabled.
Itās been relatively unproblematic, although I am thinking about storing images externally (S3 or Digital Ocean Object Storage).
As for financing, I run ads on the main site, not the forum. The reason for this is, that people can donate to have the ads removed, and I havenāt worked out how to turn ads off for some users on the forum, so I left it ad-free for now. If I were just running a forum, Iād probably just throw some ads in there (though Iād like to be able to turn them off for some users).
Weāve scaled things up a bit to handle and done some performance-related tweaks and upgrades. Weāre now on a High-Availability CPU (āHigh CPUā) with 12GB / 8 CPUs.
It probably was too expensive to run discourse for a chat style system for 100k+ people that continued to grow without any constraints. But thatās just a guess.
Also the timing of conversation in cryptocurrency is important. They are shilling and inventing and the rest of it. So synchronized chat in real-time is probably more appropriate than anything.
40 Gb to small for large community with 1 million views, storage play a huge role on communties. not only cpu power. Even computer relax with more storage.
I donāt think you can say that. Like many projects, the leads could have lost interest or got what they needed out of the exercise and reached their objectives.