# How minimal is your forum?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-minimal-is-your-forum/399941
**Category:** General
**Created:** [April 4, 2026, 3:03pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-minimal-is-your-forum/399941 "2026-04-04T15:03:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [April 4, 2026, 5:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-minimal-is-your-forum/399941/5 "2026-04-04T17:28:33Z")

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I’d say quite minimal… In appearance? 🤔

[https://unicyclist.com](https://unicyclist.com)

- 5-6 most used categories, a few other niches
  - scarce nested categories, not for main categories

- 2 tags reserved for a single category
- 💬 Chat enabled for direct messages only, but it’s barely used (except by staff)
- 1 theme
- very few tweaks (two custom badges, css, 1 group for professionals)
- 2 official plugins:
  - [Discourse Who’s Online](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-whos-online/52345)
  - [Discourse Yearly Review](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-yearly-review/105713)

- 3 third-party plugins:
  - [Locations Plugin 🌍](https://meta.discourse.org/t/locations-plugin/69742)
  - [🖼 Topic Gallery](https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-gallery/394953)
  - [Search Thumbnails](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-thumbnails/395082)

- A few third-party and official components:
  - [Emoji Fluff](https://meta.discourse.org/t/emoji-fluff/339163)
  - [MD Topic List Mobile component](https://meta.discourse.org/t/md-topic-list-mobile-component/146341) (can’t stand the defaut mobile topic list view)
  - [Inline PDF Previews](https://meta.discourse.org/t/inline-pdf-previews/157649)
  - [Versatile Banner](https://meta.discourse.org/t/versatile-banner/109133) aimed at greeting visitors and new members, but I should work on it
  - [Progress Bar](https://meta.discourse.org/t/progress-bar/394184) activated only when we’re on the community donation goal to pay the servers
  - + a few tiny other ones not necessarily worth listing

- Thinking of using LLMs to fight spam as all alternatives I tried are not perfect enough after all

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!

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