I like Discourse a lot. The installation on DO was super simple; only problem was setting up SMTP which worked flawlessly when I finally had the right settings.
Here’s a little bit of background. I’ve been on a niche video editing forum that’s been around since 2008. It’s a huge mother of a beastly Invision Community forum with five million posts. The admin says that after updates, it takes literal days to fully index. Eldest members no longer interested in making videos still like using the forum socially, but that’s created a divide in the community.
So the forum is splitting in two halves. I have one of them; the group that’s still big into making their videos.
I have a perfectly functioning Discourse forum set up that I haven’t opened for general use yet, but I’m being inundated with so many feature questions. Staffs from the old forum who need moderating privileges in specific forums but not others. People are asking about video show rooms, status update modules, blogs.
I’ve looked at the Discourse plugins and as much as I like this forum software, I’m starting to think it’s not going to be what I need for my community. I see a lot of SSO plugins, CMS, wordpress, Q&A’s. It’s like, the impression I get is that Discourse is intended for a specific market of professionals trying to sell stuff which is fine, but we’re just a bunch of hobbyists who, frankly, are going to spend most of our time s___posting and talking about games.
I really like how easy Discourse is to install and maintain. Ultimately, though, I need finer grain controls over groups and permissions, and a richer “novelty” plugin environment. Can I ever reasonably expect the environment I need to materialize on Discourse, or am I just treading in the wrong environment altogether for forum software?
Ever? Sure. Soon enough for your needs? Possibly not. Discourse is still a relative youngster in the forum space; it’s first public release was only a few years ago, whilst IPB’s first release was back in 2002. So it’s not surprising that the current set of available plugins for Discourse are centered around using it for more serious purposes, because that’s where the resources are. As Discourse’s popularity grows, I’m sure that people will make all sorts of “novelty” plugins.
As for finer-grained permissions, the keyword you’re looking for is “category-specific moderators”. There’s been a lot of talk about it over the years, and it is something that will eventually exist in core, but it’s a big feature that touches a lot of places, and the demand for it from our paying customers isn’t as great as some other things, so it hasn’t yet been implemented.
Above all else since they’re amateur video remixers, and they want a showroom. They’re used to a system where they input a URL for their video, the video is posted, and can be voted up by other users. Such as that they want to see the top five videos submitted for the month, they can get them easily.
I apologize, Jeff. I understand you’re all professional developers. Forgive my colloquial… again, I’m not a professional using Discourse. I’m literally just an internet rando and far from your typical usage demographic.
It’s all right, I took the opportunity to clean that up in the ~10 places it existed here. Some rando also set up a dot-com Discourse site with that word and … I just checked and of course it’s no longer around today, because what do you expect when that’s the baseline standard you’re setting?
