Well, I just keep it updated, and don’t 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.
It’s 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 haven’t 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, I’d probably just throw some ads in there (though I’d like to be able to turn them off for some users).
We’ve scaled things up a bit to handle and done some performance-related tweaks and upgrades. We’re now on a High-Availability CPU (‘High CPU’) 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 that’s 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 don’t 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.
Congrats on your continued success!
THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR AMAZING and IMPORTANT WORK! 
