My story with Discourse

Community
1

Hello Discourse Community,

I just want to share with you guys my little story with Discourse.

One year ago I create an ad classified website for Hungarian Vape Community with Wordpress. But it was only for trade used devices.

I knew I needed something much more communal to create a well-functioning community! Discourse is exactly what I was looking for. I remember when I first saw the Discourse Meta website I immediately felt that this place was born for the community.

Reading, reading and more reading…

First of all, I read hundreds of topics on meta to be aware of what it really is.
These topics mostly included:

  • How to install?
  • What server environment does it need?
  • What is the difference between a plugin and a theme component? How to install them?
  • Topics made for new users. New user guide…
  • What is the trust levels?
    etc…

I found everything in one place that was phenomenal. It was all a simple search or a click on related topics.

Testing process…

After a few weeks reading, I try to install my very first Discourse on local (Mac). This is for learning how to use admin section, moderate contents and users. Install themes, theme components, plugins and understanding why things work the way they do. Just for everything works better and easier on the public live site.

Ready to launch

After testing, I felt I am ready to launch my Discourse site. In the first round, I had to choose a hosting provider as all my other websites are at Digital Ocean so I choose them. I installed it on a $5 droplet. I followed the installation guide here too and it worked for the first time. The site is still operating with that install i just resize the droplet.

I started to set up the forum and made various changes. I have never touched one thing and have no intention of doing so. The Trust Levels! I think this is a carefully designed system with enough experience and the results of several years research. So this is probably necessary for a well-functioning community. Now I understand and try to pass on to Community members why this is important. At first, no one understands and asks why it need? So I translated every documents and create new ones to make it more understandable. Then sooner or later they will realize that it must to have! It is need for a healthy community! I Trust the Discourse Team, Authors and Community! :slightly_smiling_face:

There is one other thing what makes Discourse in my opinion the best choice. This is the support! The support is something that makes people feel bigger safe if something went wrong or just need a suggestion. Have a question etc… Just tell another provider who give such strong support like Discourse. Not only a Team but a huge helpful Community!

My Discourse site has been running for six months and is constantly growing with more and more members coming. Our Community really like it. Thank you! :pray: :blush:

My setup

Digital Ocean (Shared CPU / 2vCPUs + 4GB Memory 60GB SSD)
BackBlaze (s3 uploads and backup)
BunnyCDN (discourse cdn + s3 cdn + image optimization)

I want to write a few line about BunnyCDN and image optimization.

My Discourse site is heavy use for photo sharing and I never changed the image upload settings. I always thought I wanted to display the uploaded images in the best possible quality. But this makes my website too expensive to users. It was almost 10MB to load the latest page. I have to do something quickly. So I was looking for an other solution to optimize images.

BunnyCDN has a service for this which is Bunny Optimizer. Okey i know this cost $9.50 / month but it is worth every penny for me.

What is the key feature in this. This will not overload server to make such things like optimize images. This happening on CDN so the website display the optimized images but BackBlaze keep the full resolution original images so users can view it if they want. It use WebP if available.

For example:
The images in Chrome use WebP extension but in Safari the same image will be JPG, JPEG if you download.

This makes my website super fast with thousands of images. And make so much cheaper without loosing the image quality because users can download the original photos. Now the latest page size ~ 3MB!
If you decide to use BunnyCDN because read this I really appreciate if you use this link to register. This is my referral link and if you register with this they give me $20 to my bcdn balance. Thank you! :slight_smile:

I hope this going to be a never ending story with Discourse :slight_smile:

Thank you for read my story! Have a nice day and be safe! :slight_smile:

Oh and I almost forget :slight_smile: my website :arrow_down:

15 Likes
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Don, your forum is an inspiration for all of us who spend time customizing discourse for our users. :grin:

Btw, how did you manage to put the reactions avatar list as popup instead of the stadard behaviour? (it’s genious btw)

3 Likes
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Thank you so much @Paracelsus :slightly_smiling_face: Feel free to joint to see more cool modifications :slightly_smiling_face:

I posted before the custom reactions.

The part you mentioned the reactions avatar popup section is the standard behaviour but I hide the default who liked section :arrow_down:

4 Likes
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Thank you for share about BunnyCDN. Will test with your link. :+1:

2 Likes
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Hello @Don
Did you set up DNS at Cloudfare?
I used Cloudfare before, Now I added Bunny cdn , after run ./launcher rebuild app, I can not access my forum now, took about 2 hours.
Should I remove DNS at Cloudfare?

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Hello @tmn,

Nope, I don’t use Cloudflare.

1 Like