I’ve been spending some time reading through different topics here, and it’s clear there’s a lot of knowledge in this community.Rather than asking a technical question right away, I thought I’d ask something a little broader.
If someone gave you a brand-new Discourse community to manage today, what’s the first piece of advice you’d share? It could be about encouraging discussions, organizing categories, handling moderation, or avoiding a mistake you made early on. I’m always interested in learning from real experiences, and I think those kinds of lessons are often more valuable than any guide.Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and joining more conversations around the forum!
If I could go back time, I would avoid creating complex themes. I had spent way too much time tinkering with the forum instead of actually making content to my platform. It is somewhat a form of procrastination, because theming Discourse is pretty fun.
I’m not advising against it, because you probably want to give your users a good experience. I think Foundation is a good theme, specially now with the modernization, but it is pretty overused, which is not a bad thing since people are already used to it.
My main advice is to just not make communities for things that don’t need communities yet. Back in 2022, I opened a site for a game studio with some friends because the thought of hosting a community was fun to me. Eventually we realized that it’s hard to run a community for something that doesn’t even exist yet and closed the site a little over a year later. It was a hard choice but there was no point in maintaining a site (even if for free) that was mostly just people (we somehow attracted 5-10DAU) making spam in the lounge and treating it like an anarchy site.
It was a great way to learn about the software and to have fun on the internet for a bit but if you’re serious about starting a site, maybe first stop to think “how will a community benefit us”?
I would say: read topics here in Documentation first. This should solve quite a lot of first-time admin queries and is a mine of information.
Seconding @darkpixlz 's point: don’t create a community for the sake of it. Does creating a Discourse forum for whatever the aim is actually solve something? Does it really benefit a group of people for a long-term use? If it doesn’t, avoid creating it for now until you have a legitimate purpose and need for it.
It’s good advice. The creation of my instance stemmed precisely from a personal need, as well as from the external necessity for this space to exist.
So, that’s it: if there’s a niche with demand for it and a personal need, it’s a great step. Hobbies usually require some form of material backing most of the time, unless you’re willing to take on the responsibility of covering the costs for a long period just to keep the project alive.
