I’m just discovering the world of discourse plugins. But before I commit to them, I need to know the consequences.
Since they are open source, there are no guarantee that they will be maintained forever (thank you creators <3) . So any day they can break and my only choice be to remove it.
But then what happens with the posts that used the plugin?
We (the Discourse team) maintain these plugins, and so they should not cause issues. Official plugins carry the green checkmark you described.
Third party plugins could damage your Discourse instance. In the vast majority of cases, uninstalling the plugin will fix the problem, but this is not always true.
My advice would be to install the bare minimum of plugins, and instead use growing collection of themes in the theme category. They are much safer to install. You mentioned an image gallery plugin - that can now be achieved with a theme like this:
Thanks! I really like the locations and events plugins, they fit my community quite well. I guess I’ll just create a bunch of topics using them, then comment out the line in my app.yml and see what happens…
Edit: I tested it
With the locations plugin, they just get erased, topics continue but without location data.
The events plugin is weird, it does not show as installed anymore, but I can still insert dates, and the previous dates are still correctly displayed.
No damage to the forum itself. But still means you’d lose all the locations data associated. Dates you’d keep some information.
Since they really fit my community I’ll use it and hope it never breaks/becomes obsolete.
Upon reinstalling them, the stuff came back as it was before uninstalling. Weird but good I guess…
