Using Discourse for a short while, majorly impressed!

Praise
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This may (probably is) not the best place to say this - but thank you!

I’ve only been using Discourse for a short while now, but am majorly impressed! Not just with the software (a forum with 1000 members of which between 50 and 100 are online at any given time - 70K+ daily views and NO HEADACHES for me!), but also with the opennes of the community and the speed of development.

So again: Thank you!

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:wink: great to see such comments

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On the contrary sir, it is the perfect place to say this :wink:

Is it public? You’re welcome to share a URL.

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It’s www.forumfeminarum.nl - it’s a Dutch forum for women.

Some interesting tidbits:

  • Currently 1100+ accounts, with a very lively community (at least, I think so :wink: )
  • It’s 11:00 on a lovely Monday morning (Dutch national holiday today, so most have the day off), and around 100 logged-in users online right now
  • Maximum number of visitors: During the Royal Wedding last Saturday, 140+ users online
  • We started setting everything up on May 1
  • Started with 2GB RAM and 2 CPU cores, but increased it to 4 GB RAM and 4 CPU cores. Which is much more than we need.
  • Big hit: the ‘Babble’ plugin. Especially during royal weddings :wink:

Attached two screenshots of the statistics page and one screenshot of the output of ‘top’. Please note that top fluctuates between a load of 0.65 and 1.20 at the moment, with an average of around 0.95.

Ninja-edit: The load was considerably higher during the Royal Wedding due to the many posts (many writes). Load averaged around 2 - 2.5 then.

If you’d like to know more, please let me know - I am happy to share!

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how did you get so many members in 3 weeks? It’s impressive.
Did you advertise?

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Support configuring hamburger selector

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Ah yes, fair question, and one I should have answered in my previous post. We set it up because another forum announced they were going to close (and they gave only two weeks notice). So the user base already existed and this is more of a migration.

Must be said though that this wasn’t the only initiative and there is one other forum active as well. That’s based on a different technology (PHPBB) and needless to say, I am a bit biased as to which one is better.

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How are you paying the server bills?

Interest based communities can be very hard to keep afloat in the long term, which is why a lot of them end up on platforms like Facebook Groups or Slack even if they would have liked to have better knowledge storage and the like.

If you haven’t secured long term sustainability yet I highly recommend looking into our Patreon integration:

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For now I’m hosting it on one of my own boxes (I’ve got a few boxes in a few data centres - used to be hosting geek). So it’s basically putting the spare capacity to good use. But the Patreon integration does look good! Thanks for the pointer!

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