I find myself in this space too. Teams can do a pretty reasonable job as a ‘forum’ in a smaller environment (say 100 users or less), but really struggles when things get big - or if other MS tenants are involved.
And Microsoft links work perfectly well from Discourse (once you train people to get and post them).
Meetings
Meetings and emails are (like them or hate them) a central facet of corporate life. Discourse can do some elements of them brilliantly, but there are some glaring holes when attempting to apply it to internal corporate environments - especially around meetings.
Noting for the record that Discourse-the-company is very happy to have people use the open source variant
Apart from the philosophical stance that open source is good for the world. In a practical, business sense, having you use Discourse strengthens the ecosystem. It provides social proof. That in turn will almost inevitably lead to paid business for the company.
well if you are really interested, I have already posted in a few others places about some of these
the ability to enable blank posts Allow for empty posts and empty topic body so that people dont always need to “have something to say”, they can just post freely as much or as little as they want
multiple emoji reactions on posts Support multiple-reactions per post (Retort style) ; users really enjoy sticking wacky emojis on posts, and they also seem to enjoy working together to create multi-emoji pictograms to create custom reactions to posts
an idea from other “old-school” forums; allowing “mod hacks”, where a forum admin or moderator is able to use CSS, HTML, and JS embedded in a single topic to change that topic for all users to do things like embed music, embed a video in the background, or change the background, enable crazy shifting text effects, etc. You could basically turn that single topic into a mini party room
quick posting; you should be able to press a single key on your keyboard, such as “`”, to immediately bring up the Post box, with it selected and the text cursor inside ready to type, and then be able to hit Tab once or twice to select the Reply button and then Enter to post your message.
some ideas from other platforms like Discord;
custom stickers and emojis ; stickers especially are great because you can turn your community’s favorite memes into quick-postable items that can be shared easily, users dont have to contstantly re-upload their favorite reaction pics constantly
ability to live stream audio and video from your desktop or phone, similar to Discord’s “voice channels” ; combine this with a Calendar so your users can all have movie night together, stream games together, etc…
obviously, some of these are more work than others. In general, I really like Discourse, but too many times Discourse feels like it is “anti-fun”. If we want forums to persist, the act of simply posting has to be enjoyable and liberating.
If you use j and k keys to navigate posts, you can use r to reply to the currently selected post, or shift + r to reply to the topic (you can also use that last one without having a post selected)
I would like to express my humble point of view as an early fan (since 2013) and evangelist of Discourse (and admin of two communities)
Sorry if I am late to the party, from my perspective, Discourse is a tool full of features and it’s so good for:
support community
product community
open source community
tech communities
And it gives its best when:
you need advanced moderator tools
you have to manage very loooong discussions
you want to keep an eye on privacy of your users
you need to strongly customize your installation theme/plugins/css/SSO
What could scare people?
You have to install/manage it by yourself
Text/Markdown editor?
If you want to start slowly Discourse hosting is not so cheap (I understand why and I get it)
not many many SaaS cheap providers
What I understand from community people It’s not perceived as a simple tool with which you can start a small community; you need to have already a budget/knowledge and maybe time to customize it as well. It almost feels like you’re choosing a cannon when all you need for now is a water gun. This is something you don’t get with alternatives like Circle, Slack, or Facebook, where you can get started with just a few easy steps.
Sorry for butting in. The one cool feature missing here was removed many years ago, iirc, in favour of adding the topic scroll feature. The feature I’m thinking of was the post/thread continuation feature which allowed folks to create a new thread following on from an existing thread. The system would then show in the top right margin that the thread was a continuation of ‘X’, or conversely, iirc, state that this thread continued, for example, here, here and here. I posted about this many years ago, perhaps I should try and find it and relink to the original screen grabs.
I loved that feature because I felt it promoted interest steams allowing the user to follow trains of thought, often created by many different authors, without needing to view a similar posts feature at the bottom of the page.
Anyway, I understand why the team made the change, but still believe after all these years that in doing so it removed one of Discourse’s most valuable features.
I was just thinking about this. Having to do Shift + R is very un-ergonmic and honestly hurts my hands (I type all day)
the version I mentioned, using the ` key, is a lot more ergonomic I think, and its traditionally been used as a shortcut key to bring up the console in other applications so it fits well too, especially since ` is a key you are unlikely to use for other purposes in a web browser I think
Unless if you need to use unusual characters on a Windows machine a bit.
My experience in New Zealand is that I use a regular US keyboard, but need macrons for Māori words sometimes. On Windows, these are accessed by pressing ` and then the letter.
magic wand, what is one such fun feature you would like in Discourse? (Bonus points if you have screenshots)
