How minimal is your forum?

Algemeen
1

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.)

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2

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

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

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  • 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.

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5

I’d say quite minimal… In appearance? :thinking:

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
  • :speech_balloon: 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:
  • 3 third-party plugins:
  • A few third-party and official components:
  • 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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6

You also forgot to mention that while you 4 content categories, you have a huge bunch of tags :open_mouth: !

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7

That’s true. I’m not sure that the tags add a lot of value in our case for regular users, but I think possibly they might help with SEO and with new joiners. They are not very uniformly used, and barely maintained (for accuracy and redundancy)

Edit: I think tags applied to fewer than 3 posts are barely doing anything, but I haven’t pruned or consolidated. I think that accounts for maybe 2/3 of our tags.

Edit: it looks like we’ve allowed TL2 to create tags, versus the default of TL3, which might have been a good idea in the early days. We have 133 users at TL2. We only have 6 at TL3 and above. Which is mildly interesting - probably some thresholds could usefully be adjusted but it’s hard to know how to figure that out. Will post. Edit: posted here.

1 like