I hope you are all having a great day, I am seeking your advice!
Myself and my colleague are looking at a new community platform, on paper discourse looks amazing but it would be awesome to hear what you the users think, what you suggest and just get some expert input.
We want to create a community experience that’s both informative and expressive, we want to allow users to share multimedia, stories and communicate together, an ability to have groups for smaller sections of the community to work together and collaborate and really grow out what is already an active community in new and exciting ways.
Have you done this? If so share your examples and experiences.
You can find loads of Discourse powered websites here, some with heavy customisation, which is fairly straight forward to do with Discourse, there are a plethora of plugins and themes also the support you receive with Discourse is second to none. It has a fantastic community who support each other.
My personal experience with Discourse has been amazing, it tried me a few times (mostly when installing, never used SSH commands before) but it taught me a lot and I’ve got our community to where I wanted it to be, although I always seem to find something new to play with
Our members have commented that Discourse is an easy to use platform for them and discussions flow very well, the topic content is nicely laid out and the topic information is easily accessible to all.
A good example of this in our community is The Mixologist group, a group that members are free to join / leave, coupled with the Mixologists Only category, where they can discuss openly on all aspects of mixing away from distractions
I administrate two communities and we’re doing all the things you described. Discourse is super easy to use and powerful at the same time. Don’t complicate stuff, focus on engagement and positioning of your community, tools come after.
