Hello to the people of Discourse! 
For the past three years, I’ve been running an online community forum built on the next-generation forum software known as Discourse, and during this time I have a lot to say about my experience using this piece of software.
First and foremost, I’d like to express how grateful I am that such a well-engineered forum software is open-source and free for self-hosting. Out of all the online forum communities I have ever touched, sites running Discourse always blew the other sites that weren’t using Discourse out of the water. Be gone were the days of flipping through cluttered and broken-up segmented pages of topic lists; Discourse felt way more dynamic and was actually up to speed with the times when compared to other software I have used such as phpBB and MyBB. The only software that came close was Flarum. Discourse was well-packed with many out-of-the-box features, such as powerful moderation that works well and communicates effectively to the moderated user, and built-in analytics. Not to mention the countless available plugins and theme components, such as ones made by great authors like Pavilion (@angus) and @merefield, who made excellent addons—thank you very much. 
Running my community forum was also a very large learning curve for me. Thanks to resources such as meta.discourse.org, I was able to learn a lot, from best practices in content moderation to managing Docker containers with Discourse. The Discourse Meta forum has been an invaluable resource to me, especially with asking support questions and having expert and helpful responses. It has helped me apply the best practices to my online community and learn from others’ experiences, something that is greatly appreciated, especially for being a free resource.
Unfortunately, after three years of running my Discourse forum, I have decided to finally cease its operations (planned for September to October) due to sustainability issues. 
As for ‘unsustainability,’ I mean that the site did not have a large demand for it. The forum I run is a fan-based, independently run discussion site for a specific indie game in ROBLOX. As of writing this, the site has reached as many as 3,379 members, which to me is a great feat of achievement; however, we have had a sluggish track record of activity. Most players participate in the game’s Discord community already, and it is important to know that community building and its success does not spontaneously occur over a weekend. Of course, great forum software does not equate to great success, but for the time I was running my discussion site, it was a great experience learning about the management of an online community, not to mention all the wonderful people I met along the way. 
In addition, I believe it is time I take a break from running the community forum as well.
With all that being said, I would like to thank the Discourse team, third-party plugin developers, and the entire Discourse community for putting together a 100% awesome internet discussion forum software and providing a foundation of support for us community managers, administrators, moderators, and members. The Discourse community has been a great help in the first steps of deploying a new Discourse site, to advice on the science of community building. I cannot thank you all enough for this terrific resource.
As for now, I will most likely be stepping away from the Discourse community (but I may be checking back from time to time to see the progress of this project 
) until maybe in the future I come across my next Discourse project. Until then, again thank you everyone who participated in contributing to this great piece of software, and I wish best of luck to the development of Discourse at CDCK Inc. Good luck and take care! 