We use Discourse in a small office. As mentioned above, there is the problem of drafts. You probably know that there is a habit of quickly creating a new folder, then a new folder (2), a new text document, a new text document (2), filling these files with different information and never renaming them afterwards.
Later it turns out that blocks of text have no time reference, no versions, no pictures, and sometimes some things are not saved due to lack of automatic saving.
The information in the text files is mixed and poorly structured. After a long time there is very little chance to find anything in such folders. Content indexing or artificial intelligence could help a bit in this case and Discourse fulfills this function.
I mentioned office teamwork. And that means that employees’ local proprietary drafts are locked behind user accounts. Speaking of employees working on a collaborative task, there is no need to hide their drafts from each other. On the contrary, it would be better if the drafts were available to everyone at once. Remember how software developers work? They put code (and often documentation as code) in a shared repository with version control. And as soon as the lead engineer checks the changes, they become available to everyone in the master branch. In the case of drafts, there is no need for such a moderator. So here Discourse is on top of things.
The problem of drafts with linked pictures is easily solved by Markdown editors (I stayed with Typora, especially when editing tables and oddly backwards base64 picture conversion - no editor inserts this text from the clipboard). Discourse is perfectly suitable as a concurrent work platform. Chat discussions are easily converted to topics or posts. The OpenAI model can play a significant role in data processing, but the built-in algorithms are also enough to make forum threads look related.
We use the inbox feature to quickly send text as an email to the forum. This way we don’t lose precious thoughts without the distraction of opening the forum itself. We then use these ideas in the brainstorm.
Using permissions, it’s easy to move topics from sandbox to public when they’re ready. Flexible trust levels allow us to organize access for different departments.