Well, free tier is not actual option. But 10USD is. And even then there is a big gap.
But, when wanted to compare real situation shoud compare prices of same same tech. And Invisions doesn’t fish small fishes like me, and then should compare what hosting here costs against prices of Invision.
Those are different type solutions even they are working at same segment. So, I don’t know totally what is the point to compare; it is like compare some e-audi and e-bmw and the telling that Nissan Leaf is really cheap
Judging by those hosting prices, I would go with the Discourse forum. It can just save you a good amount of money. (save about $800 per year doing this)
Groups are a mini community within a community and are also intended for discussions. This fits well into the concept of discourse. Such an extension will be useful, I hope it will appear in less than six months. Platforms are evolving and users are becoming more demanding. This means that over time, discourse will have even more opportunities
Right - we’d just like to limit how many plugins we have to layer on top. Core functionality is always preferred, and the groups topic has given our team pause when comparing off-the-shelf Discourse vs Invision.
That said, and speaking of dreaming up ideas, here’s a good one we’d like to see. I call it "3D Groups " or “Ven-Groups” and it would be the ability for groups to overlap each other for users that are members of multiple groups. Here is a practical example of how it might work:
Two groups exist: “Backyard Chickens” (people who raise chickens) and “Northeastern US” (people who live in the northeast). If a user belongs to both group, they would see a sub-forum inside of each group that is “Backyard Chickens + Northeastern US” so that people who raise chickens in the northeast could more easily find each other and connect. This would be awesome. PS, I don’t think Invision can do this at the moment either.
Groups can overlap in default Discourse. You can be a member of more than one group. In fact once promoted to Trust Level 1 you are a member of Trust Level One & Zero.
If each of these was a Category, someone could have access to both, neither or one of them.
You could make them Sub-categories and someone could have their primary group permissioned for the parent Category and using that plugin I referred to, the parent Category could be their home, allowing them to dip into either of these Sub-categories.
I think you should start building things and see how you go
Right, but would it create a specific forum area for members of BOTH groups? Maybe this exists already, but I obviously haven’t played with any of these groups plugins yet.
Agreed - just need to get permission from the team to move forward!
The configuration I just suggested is semi-automated … but critically only staff can configure that.
Something you could start with perhaps, unless you already have this functionality and it would prevent you migrating.
I’d argue that you might want to retain central control more than you might think. Users could always ask staff member for when they need a new space?
Did you make a similar topic on the Invision official forum to get opinions from their own perspective regarding the features you need? Can you share a link if you did? That could be an interesting read!
I think the way to do this would be to automatically tag topics by the geographic region. I’m not aware of a plugin that does that, but it shouldn’t be difficult to create a plugin that adds a certain tag when a topic is created by members of a certain group.
I have not used Invision for almost 15 years now, but we are working on a plugin that allows groups to self organize in a way similar to Reddit sub-reddits, which is very much what OP described above.
This is similar to Facebook groups (socialengine, phpfox (metafox)), but adapted for forums. When adding third-party extensions (videos, blogs, music, chat, events, etc.), the corresponding tabs appear. https://demo.ipsviet.com/clubs/2-funny/?do=overview
