I wanted to start a discussion today that is both a fun trip down memory lane and a guiding light for those who are just starting out with their very first Discourse instance.
Imagine you could send a single message back in time to your past self, who just logged into their Discourse site as an admin for the very first time, opened the dashboard, and was staring at hundreds of settings with a mix of excitement and absolute panic.
What is the one thing you would tell yourself from the future, based on everything you know now? If you’d like, feel free to share the story behind it!
To start things off, here is what I would tell my beginner self:
“Give yourself time to truly understand the system, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Learning, experimenting, and seeking help are the things that will allow you to grow and build something great in the future.”
Follow the KISS principle, and add features only if they are needed. Never just because a feature might be cool or potentially useful sometime in the future.
My introduction to Discourse stemmed from the fact that creating a forum became my work project. It wasn’t just supposed to be a forum, but an extension of our corporate CRM, with many features not available in the standard Discourse installation or even in custom plugins.
I told myself that I should focus on the bare minimum functionality and get it fully working. There’s no point in chasing dozens of other features that “would be cool to have and show off to colleagues.” When I was first starting out, I spent a lot of time developing plugins that were completely incompatible with the Discourse core (for example, my anonymous posting plugin, which impersonates a user on the client side who wishes to remain anonymous). Ultimately, I used AI to develop and get many plugins fully working that I couldn’t find online. However, it took a lot of time, and I realize that if I had progressed gradually, rather than trying to do everything at once, my decisions would have been better and I would have arrived at them faster.
Perhaps someone might find it useful to check out my plugins I created for a corporate forum. Here are a few:
GitHub - ban2zai/discourse-anonymous-plugin · GitHub : A plugin for posting topics and messages as an anonymous user using a flag in Composer, without having to switch to anonymous mode. The real user is stored in the database, but everyone except staff and the author of the anonymous post sees the anonymous user specified in the plugin settings.
“Take your time to learn the basics! It’s truly not that hard and you have free time”
(my young self won’t listen)
“Each customization you do will break in the future at some point. You won’t want to maintain all the crappy stuff you’re so eager to add”
(young self might listen to this; I doubt it however)
“No, regardless of your feelings, Discourse is not the best software for some communities”
(young self refuses to believe future self)
“Share your opinions and ideas about the software: even a single voice can lead to positive software changes…”
(young self will do that anyway, a lot, on meta, from outside and from inside)
“…But don’t be overconfident that the ideas you come up with are the greatest that have ever existed”
(young self tells future self: “but you still are”)
“You’ll experience a pandemic, generative AI will completely reshape how many things work on the Internet and be a catastrophic environmental failure, also you’ll have a 43°C summer in several years”
Too many times thinking that I should be able to do something and then find I don’t understand what was biting off. Then spending way more time and resources on the project than I intended. Applies to most area, spend time and resources on your value add, not something you can hire an expert for.
