How minimal is your forum?

[Ed_S]

I realise that there are a number of Discourse features I’m choosing not to use. I have

• only four content Categories, nothing nested
• no third party plugins
• only 8 enabled plugins, all core (all default-enabled)
• one theme component (Topic List Previews)
• no chat
• no reactions
• no LLMs
• no additional groups
• no additional badges

I’m interested in how many others are also choosing not to load up with features.

(I do of course recognise features may be popular and may even have been compelling reasons to choose Discourse. I’m sure each feature has its proponents. I’m not really seeking to discuss the attractions of adding them, only the choice of not adding them.)

[sniper756]

Could you please share the link? I’d love to take a look at your website~

[Ed_S]

It’s retrocomputingforum, dot com. (Not large, about 150 monthly active users, 400 monthly posts.)

[eisammy (Sammy)]

• 9 categories
• some core plugins + some third-party ones (32)
• around 12 components (some maintained by me out of necessity)
• no chat
• with custom reactions
• uses LLM for moderation and translation into several languages
• groups curated by the team
• various badges created by the team, along with some modified defaults.

Currently, I host it on a KVM that I virtualized myself, so resources aren’t really an issue, and Discourse is quite optimized in this regard.

If the focus is on information exchange, I have a parallel project using CDCK’s own infrastructure, with 3 categories and hashtags solely based on demand, with a full focus on text exchange.

Neurodivergentes

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I’d say quite minimal?

https://unicyclist.com

• A few CSS tweaks
• 2 official plugins:
  • Discourse Who’s Online
  • Discourse Yearly Review
• 3 third-party plugins:
  • Locations Plugin
  • Topic Gallery
  • Search Thumbnails
• A few third-party and official components:
  • Emoji Fluff
  • MD Topic List Mobile component (can’t stand the defaut mobile topic list view)
  • Inline PDF Previews
  • Versatile Banner aimed at greeting visitors and new members, but I should work on it
  • Progress Bar activated only when we’re on the community donation goal to pay the servers
  • + a few tiny other ones not necessarily worth listing

Visually speaking, and when it is used as an admin or user, the forum looks and feels mostly like a default install, with slight new features and tweaks.

I think that a strong force of Discourse is to be very capable in terms of features as a default install, while still providing a vast array of official, maintained plugins.
And I firmly believe many instances can work very well without or with very few modifications.

Remember, folks: each time you add an official, third-party, or custom modification to your site, you also add a potential point of failure!