The unfortunate thing about our use case is that we don’t care about either of those features. We won’t be using the paid membership feature at all and likely won’t be using the courses feature. Our use case really is just about having an internal community platform where we coordinate community service projects, in-person classes, and craft/art projects. All in a way that needs to be accessible to a general audience.
It’s literally just the complexity and design. I’ve seen @codinghorror say in several places “It’s just CSS, you can update it.”
Of course that’s technically correct, but it doesn’t take into account the resources needed to do that: access to technical skills, knowledge of the platform to be customized, and the many thousands of dollars worth of employee time to do it.
That hurdle eliminates Discourse from the consideration funnel for so many organizations. We’re just a medium sized nonprofit. We don’t have any devs on staff where we can waive away the cost of customizing a test. Even if we did we couldn’t justify the many thousands of dollars in opportunity cost to set up an apples-to-apples demo. Imagine having to pay Circle or Slack thousands of dollars to demo a $400 / month hosted product!
I suspect one of the reasons there’s no “simplified” Discourse instance that’s demoable is because it would take so much effort to set that up. That’s a bonkers amount of effort to expect from potential customers! But maybe it’s a reasonable amount of effort from the solution provider. At least, I hope that it is. Because we can’t afford $20k in payroll or contractor costs to set up Discourse, but I’d jump on the opportunity to pay for a hosted enterprise plan that was accessible to my community. That might be evident from me posting about this stuff at 9pm on a Sunday.