# Building a Discourse for educational communities

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-a-discourse-for-educational-communities/378677
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [August 15, 2025, 1:19am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-a-discourse-for-educational-communities/378677 "2025-08-15T01:19:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![maiki](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/maiki/32/233950_2.png) [@maiki](https://meta.discourse.org/u/maiki)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2025, 12:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-a-discourse-for-educational-communities/378677/5 "2025-08-16T00:17:19Z")

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> [@jimkleiber](#):
>
> What was your previous go-to advice for setting up a private group and why do you think it’s no longer valid, either in general or for this case?

I run a few sites for various projects and peer groups, and I configure Discourse with the following ideas in mind:

1. Reduce distraction
2. Keep it simple
3. Content is ephemeral

With that in mind…

> [@NateDhaliwal](#):
>
> Hmm… what’s your take on the chat messages disappearing after 90 days? Would it make more sense to extend/remove it?

…I leave `chat channel retention days` at the default 90 days _or shorter_.

Since my personal/private communities are semi-intentional (meaning everyone knows someone, not random connections from the net), I worry less about moderation in chat, and am more concerned about hosting the personal chat logs of my friends, and hence I want them to disappear fastest of all content on the site! 🙂

In this use case, chat _might_ replace SMS… but I am not counting on it! However, today a tree fell over one of two roads leading to the school, and we got multiple email messages about it. I read them after I returned from school drop-off. Maybe there is a role for chat in there, somewhere.

> [@jimkleiber](#):
>
> Because I think one of the biggest challenges/worries I face is how people may put hyper-personal information on the platform and not knowing how to manage that technically/socially/legally.

> [@Ed\_S](#):
>
> In your place, I would be listing out three kinds of things to clarify
> 
> - technical
> - social
> - legal
> 
> Unfortunately for this case, in many jurisdictions the legal constraints may well be the dominant ones in guiding what can be done.

It did not occur to me to break down this use case in this manner, but I will give it a try!

To have this conversation, let’s focus on one at a time: technical/social/legal, in order of how much I think I am an expert. 😃

## The Technical

When I composed this list…

> [@maiki](#):
>
> The plan so far:
> 
> 1. Simple categories: community (general anything talk), people (free form profile topic/user wall and linked from profile), knowledge (wiki topics for gathering evergreen info), todo (actionable tasks with topics that can be closed)
> 2. Horizon theme: simple and works for this community, emphasis on ease to find info rather than shiny gimmicks
> 3. Chat rooms: starting out with two, a “townhall” type and a help channel (no reason to make it difficult to get help for any thing, ya know?)
> 4. Groups for mentioning/messaging: I plan to test this with a small core group of power volunteers to find if this will be useful
> 5. End of year plan: I plan to study and document how we should garden the community content, including turning content into PMs or deleting

…I was surprised by how easy it was to describe what I was building. It is because I actually turned _off_ a lot of Discourse features to get the site how I wanted it.

For discussion, **I have two challenges for you** :

1. What is a great format to capture the technical aspects of a Discourse?
2. Ask me anything about how the site is technically configured!

😎

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