People were using the forum as a chat room anyway, and if we have a wiki there isn’t much point to all the risks that come with a public forum. Discourse obviously has better privacy than centralized stuff like Discord though.
Discourse admin experience was a dream but UI style and speed was garbage and had many potential users tell me to move to a different forum software.
The software was (very) stable on debian based stuff, but not on anything RHEL based for some reason (even when using Docker). I’m also anticipating RHEL based distros won’t even have a way to use Discourse in a Meta-forum-supported-way, as it’s not clear that Docker will continue updating it’s CentOS image with CentOS going away.
Varnish caching and/or Cloudflare didn’t improve the speed issue much. Might have continued using Discourse for some other project if conventional server CPUs were faster or something. Will probably keep it in my back pocket though just because of how easy to install and admin it is, and how stable/secure it is.
Discourse has now a different, integrated, official and powerful chat solution (kind of looks like Slack/Discord), but maybe your community didn’t just need a forum for their need.
Yeah, unfortunately that plugin was a bit of a bodge… you’d have to rearchitect a fair bit to do chat properly in Discourse, and we have now done that.
No question that we need fast-lane (chat) and slow-lane (topic) support side-by-side. It’s my fault that we didn’t do it sooner, but rest assured, this will be an entirely different level of super shiny polish with full integration, not the super-hacky bodge that was the old third party chat plugin.