Looking for a new home on Discourse

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I am a community-builder, and a refugee from the Nanowrimo meltdown, looking for a home for a small group of writers – about 35 – who are trying to stay together and keep writing. We like Discourse, and from my recent experiments in your demo area, we’d be happy with a nearly purely vanilla implementation.

I would be the primary admin, and do any tech work needed (I’m a retired software engineer, lots of languages from 6800 assembler through C to Perl, primarily software test development and automation of web testing)

So far, I see only two modifications I would want, which were mentioned elsewhere here as being standard plugins requiring no coding: (1) hidden categories except if user is logged in, and (2) admin approval of new sign ups.

There is a basket of bad actors roaming the Nano forum, fanning the flames, and none of us want them to follow us.

We have no interest in monetization, and I’m hoping your free Creative - Other forum creation option would be available to us, the $50 month Basic is too steep, only two of us are actual professional writers and both of them are on a shoestring as it is. The rest are pure amateurs, like me, even if I have got some 800K of text in a massive collection of badly organized and overlapping files. It’s fun getting to just play.

I’d be using a terms and conditions modeled on Permies and Cloudy Nights, keeping it pretty simple as long as we are small. If the group grows, I’ll extend it.

If it’s not too hard, I would like to put a checkbox on the sign up, “I promise to be nice” which is about the most core reason (other than writing) our group has coalesced into its current form, hiding out in a couple of the peripheral local regions currently somewhat shielded from the firestorm

We just love writing together, and we know Discourse.

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I’ll add that I’ve got about 18 years as an organizer and volunteer coordinator in a traditional dance and music community, face to face group with weekend events and a scattering of local monthly events.

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If you have $7 or $14/month (perhaps plus a bit for mail, but I doubt it), you can host with Digital Ocean and Mailgun. You can follow the standard install instructions or use https://dashboard.literatecomputing.com/ and join the Free Trial group to install for free (with less email support and hand-holding than I give paying customers). You’d need to get API keys for Mailgun and Digital Ocean (there are links on the dashboard when you need them) and a hostname. You’d also need to be able to configure DNS for your domain.

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Hello and welcome @Judy_Hawkins :slight_smile:

If budget is an issue (and your application to the Free programme doesn’t pan out) there’s always the option to self-host too, which can be reasonably inexpensive for a small site. If you have even a little bit of a tech background the standard install instructions are pretty easy and you can be up and running in no time. :slight_smile:

Both of these are core features and can be set up straight from the UI. :+1: Though adding an extra plugin is pretty easy too, if you ever want any - and a theme-component is even easier. :slight_smile:

I hope you find someplace you can call your new home. :crossed_fingers:

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@Judy_Hawkins I have a Discourse cluster dedicated to testing. It is mostly vanilla with a default set of plugins. I can donate 1 managed site at no cost. Since your community is small, the staging should be able to handle it without breaking a sweat. You’ll need to bring in your own domain though.

If that is something that works, Your community is welcome to be my guest for as long as they like.

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Thank you! I’ll go run those ideas by my core group of users, and see what they think.

I’ll be glad to hear more ideas!

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Is that Discourse? I don’t want to try to move them to an unfamiliar environment if I don’t absolutely have to, I’d probably lose half of them. They haven’t cottoned onto Permies.

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When I’ve talked to my core group, I’ll probably be giving the Free application a try. But they have to be on board, it may be me spearheading but it’s all of them who will make it fly.

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I’m definitely interested, if the Free application doesn’t go. Whether my other group members will be, I’m less sure.

The first question will likely be, “Yeah, but who is that? how long is indefinitely going to be? we don’t want to be wondering when the next panic move will be.”

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I’m a discourse user/consultant. I am a member of Pavilion a freelancers owned Tech Cooperative which is a Partner of Discourse. However, the Staging site has no relation to Pavilion, It is my personal asset.

The server has been online since 2016 and since I’m working in the Discourse ecosystem, it won’t be going offline anytime soon. However, If things change and it has to go offline at some point, You will always have the option to take your data and move to a self-hosted instance, Which you can also do from the get go.

No issues, I had to extend the offer. It is up to you to take it (or not.)

Self-Hosting will be the way to go if you want to save costs. However, it’ll be a bit difficult to manage.

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Yes. The standard install is Discourse. dashboard.literatecomputing.com does a standard install.

He’s a highly respected developer in the Discourse community. It’s a very generous offer. As he describes you’ll be able to move to another host by taking a backup and restoring it elsewhere. But if Free seems too good to be true, for $7-15/month, you can take up my offer and know that you are paying Digital Ocean for a VM and that it won’t go away as long as you are paying.

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I would be glad to minimize the management headaches, and for me personally I think this would be a great choice, if the Free application doesn’t pan out.

I totally recognize that it is a generous offer, from a fellow tester; but I don’t know how my community will see it, and I must defer to them. Only one of them is a software engineer, and he’s working today, so I don’t know if I’ll hear back from him, or my other core users, possibly not for a couple days.

So I have asked the questions they will mostly likely want answered, and I totally appreciate the answers!

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Thank you for all the more information, I’m diving into waters I’ve not ever been in, and I’ll be sorting this out and trying to give my folks a simple set of choices out of a plethora of complexities available on the web.

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Studying documentation, reading up on understanding how an install would work if we go for self hosting, which might appeal to the other software engineer. Or might not…

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The switch from being hosted to self-hosting is quite easy, if you make sure, you always have access to a backup and the control over your domain.

If risk management is a high priority for you, I would therefore recommend renting at least the domain and the backup space (a s3 instance) elsewhere yourself.

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Well, the feedback I’m getting is let’s hold off on anything this complex.

Our youngest and most prolific writer has started posting on Permies, and we’re drifting over there.

I’m trying to figure out how to work their rather awkward software, it’s paged, arg. Anyways: my guess is we’ll settle there and wait to see whether Nano comes back alive at the end of the year.

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Thank you!

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Thank you for the offer! I’ve got a number of offers, and I’m very grateful!

I’m following the lead of my community, for the moment; they’re settling in elsewhere at the moment, so we’ll see how that goes.

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A little, natural question for the Discourse team: why not offer sub-discourse functionality like Reddit? :laughing: Not only developing the software, but also provide an alternative to Reddit(whose UI is really bad today).

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I think I’m interesting in joining you all- I do want support as I continue writing, but I don’t understand the rest of your intro and invite – cost? Implementation? Can you break down your lingo in layman’s terms, please?

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