What is the minimum required activity? Is this implementation correct?

Support
1

Hi, discourse is elegant in onboarding users and keeping them informed. I’ve used it before where I’m on the commenting side. So I want to see if I can make this work on my blog, however I got an email:

Hi,

We’re writing to you about your free Discourse site on technicalblog.discourse.group. It has seen no activity for a few weeks and as mentioned in our FAQs, having an active community is required for us to continue hosting your free forum. If you want to keep the site online, you should invite more users and create more topics soon.

If you want to shut down your community, you can cancel service from your admin dashboard.

First, is this implementation correct? I’ve added the embed discourse snippet to my post template at the bottom.

Then for understanding activity: What is the minimum amount of users and/or comments a discourse should get (per x period?) to stay active?

Thank you and feel free to comment..

2

We’re expecting at least a couple users and a handful of topics to be posted on a new free site within the first 3 weeks. If there’s only one user and no new content we’ll send a first notice of inactivity after 3 weeks, another at 6 weeks, and the site will be marked to be decommission if there’s no activity at 7 weeks.

The free tier is still fairly new, so we may adjust these a bit as we learn.

It appears to be!

3

I’m not expecting any comments this year tbh. Feel free to reach out after 6 weeks.

4

Then why do you want a forum?

5

This year I’m not expecting it, though it might happen sooner than later as I continue to publish and people bookmark it.

6

Getting people to start using a forum is tricky since most of my users are my followers who are 60+ years of age. So it would take a long time to get the ball rolling at a minimum level - I am hoping some youngsters would register and post occasionally. But that would still take time - is there a way to have this hosted even with 0 activity for a year ? If not, will self-hosting discourse on my server help me overcome the limitations with a discourse hosted forum ?

7

Yes. You can self-host with no requirements. The cheapest is probably Install Discourse on a residential internet with Cloudflare Tunnel. It’s a little tricky. Using a virtual machine is easier and more reliable

8

If you’re looking for something reliable and affordable to host Discourse, I think you’ll find the best current alternative here: