What would you like done?
I am struggling to determine whether Discourse is the right approach for testing comments on my free content wiki style website.
First off I should say that we are using VS17 (.Net Framework 4.5) and my tech is not the best at determining the right solution, just developing. The C# wrapper for Discourse is not compatible. However, firstly is Discourse the right approach based on the below?
Website:
We have a new free website with many thousands of historical short stories in a wiki style based on geographic locations and want to allow comments and engagement on those pages. People should only be commenting/discussing against these stories. When people want to post new topic content (such as a new story in this location), we should publish through our own simple CMS, not through the forum. Hence, we want to limit topic discussions and it is not a true open forum style.
Also, with respect to other features like “Suggested Topics” and “Recent Topics”, as our stories are geographically based, relevant topics are really just our other stories which are physically close by, not necessarily relevant by activity. So these elements would prefer to either remove or make more relevant. Hence, am I customising Discourse to the point where it is not the right solution.
However, I like the trust system and forum style engagement for people to debate the historical aspect of a story but prefer it to be close to the content page we have. I potentially could use the trust system to enable someone to post new content without requiring approval on our website, although it might be better to just do this custom in our system.
We have also built our own simple admin user system which we can integrate a commenting solution into.
Initial Aim:
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Test an integrated discussion solution on each content story page, which the ability to read and comment. I am ok with going off the story page initially to the full forum to engage if necessary. I just don’t want people to get lost. I do see the suitability of a full discussion thread on historical stories though, because there is the potential for people to get into the intricate detail about what happened and to make suggestions for further research. So it is intended to be more than just a simple commenting solution.
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As we have thousands of stories, there is no point creating a topic for each page as there might only be comments on 1% of them
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Integrate our user system with SSO (my dev can do this)
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Advise on whether Discourse is the easiest solution for this (or suggest an alternative and one that may be more accessible via C#) and the structure to use
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Help in the future to setup with customisations based on discussion capability generating engagement
When do you need it done?
- Suitability advice needed immediately, customisations etc can be done later