I am looking into 3rd party software to handle what amounts to a need for a large number of very small forums. We have our own custom solution but would love it if this is something discourse could handle.
Basically it amounts to a chat room about a specific event, of which there in theory, could be thousands. The creation of these small forums would have to be automated and consist of just a few categories.
Any information would be appreciated including a link to anyone trying something like this.
If you really mean “chat”, that is ephemeral discussions of thousands of short posts, Discourse is a bad solution, regardless of your “many small forums” question.
If you want many small forums, you can do that with multisite. You’ll need to create a database for each forum, however, and I think that it won’t scale well into the thoussands.
Oh. Right! I made the mistake of answering what I thought he was asking (“a large number of very small forums”) rather than what his use case describes.
Yes. I’d make an “event” be either a group PM, a single topic (especially if you don’t care who can see it). Maybe create a topic, have the users forced to watch it somehow, and immediately un-list it so that it doesn’t show up to anyone who doesn’t have the URL.
To be clear, we will create what amounts to an event that has a place and time. Then, we want people that look at this event (they can be public or private) to be able to chat about it. An example would be a company picnic where people might chat about things specific to that event. Right now it is a custom system that is very simple, just allowing a single thread with posts and replies. If possible, I would like to use Discourse to create small forums which might even be a single “general” category.
I plan to better understand discourse but not for a couple months.
