Long read ahead. Promise it is a thoughtful, well typed out Discourse success story!
My use case for Discourse has always been extremely unique, so much so I think I might have gotten a few eyebrows before. I will touch briefly on that, though I think I talked about the use-case in some other posts, I am not going to try and dig through them to link.
My use case is for an internal site to host all of our moderation actions of our Roblox game, growing up with the platform it has been hard to let it go, with my latest adventure of the last 2 years being the Community Manager. We previously used Trello for years, it was simple, it was easy to manage, and so on. However, like all great things, capitalism swooped in for the kill blow, and they put some gracious yet very cost-straining limits on even existing users. If I remember correctly its 1 Board per workspace, and 10 users. That created a problem for a team of moderators that consisted at the time of about 45 users. This ended us up with [Note we had to reserve 3 users on each board for admins] 6 workspaces and 6 boards. IDK about you, but considering most of my moderators are Teenagers, managing and maintaining 6 boards was not an easy task. And when a user would submit an appeal, digging through all 6 of them, on mobile was terrible.
Then I got crafty. I have too many years of IT experience to not know some things I don’t know but hey that’s what you get with hobbyist knowledge style you spend 12 hours learning something new, and you are good to go. So, I tried a few other open-source options out, tinkered around with them, just to see what I was up against. After the 3rd Kaban board alternative I said enough is enough let’s think outside of the box.
Mind you I have used Discourse before, and the last time I had used it, was a long time ago prob during the early years, like 2016, or 2017 Ish? I always knew it was a great platform for what it was for.
So, I thought about my needs, and well. The need for logging is quite simple, just need to post the username, their Roblox Profile, label the offense, and a link to the evidence.
Well, here I am almost 2 years later of using Discourse, and I will say without a doubt it absolutely is a multi-functional Swiss army knife in terms of use cases.
With it being so flexible, customizable, the overall experience has been one of the best things in my experience I have had.
I have had my share of quirks, issues, drawbacks and so forth, but overall, it has been really nice.
Alright! Now you got my back story! Now let’s get to my newest needs.
My community is gearing up for our Version 2 game release, it is highly anticipated, and I really love customizing things, I love the nerdy factor, being able to trim down to exactly what I need - so I started thinking about how I would like to move some other resources forward with that in mind.
I thought on it, talked to my team, and we thought that a second Discourse site would be beneficial. It has Docs, it has Tickets, it has Moderation Tools, it has support for custom plugins e.g. Connecting a user’s Roblox Profile to their discourse.
Fast forward today, we launch v2 in about 60 days, so I got to work on researching multi-site installations. Found what I needed, and did some deep dive searching, and yes, I even used AI, I have to admit that even with 10 years of experience, some of the trickery YML has makes me want to pull my hair out.
I started this whole process at 10 PM last night and ended it at about 12:30 AM. I had many issues that at first I was kind of confused on, yeah, I know “Experienced Sys admins” disclaimer is front and center, but even the most experienced can have some puzzlement once in a while, right? I started back this morning and finished a bit ago about 2pm or so.
SOOOO, it ended up being a config issue specifically a syntax thing with YML, I got kind of confused on what file needed to be where, and what data needed to be in it, so finally got that all fixed.
I also ended up using Caddy, as the installation suggests a reverse proxy is necessary, Caddy worked flawless. I also use Cloudflare and that is working also flawless.
I am running on 2GB RAM, 4GB Swap - 2vCore CPU, so I am most def pushing the limits here, but I think for the first few weeks, I will be fine until an upgrade is probably the most def necessity.
But yeah I just wanted to take a moment to praise Discourse, the whole community, every contributor, founder, y’all really have pushed Discourse to being a place for community, no matter the audience or purpose. And I am really proud to be a part of that.