There is an interesting website about MediaWiki called WikiApiary which shows details of many websites gleaned from the MediaWiki API.
It would be good if a similar database of Discourse forums existed, as a website and - ideally - on the Discourse Hub app.
I’ve just learnt from old versions of the main welcome topic that an automated register of forums has been on the cards for years, and from a forum topic which now links to Discourse customers | Discourse - Civilized Discussion that there were over 10,000 Discourse forums in 2017, so clearly this would not be an easy task!
I believe that the Discourse team is not very interested in creating such a system. Personally, I shy away from it due to the risk of accidentally using secret knowledge (e.g. “this private/unlaunched forum exists”, etc - especially if they’re our customers) while building up the data, so we’ve left it to others who are motivated to catalog public knowledge, such as Google (who don’t currently seem interested).
Additionally, there have been bad experiences with people spamming the contact email of forums; making a canonical list would make the spammers’ job easier.
All good points. It would be a huge effort and the advantages could well be outweighed by the disadvantages! I suppose if someone is interested in something then he or she will find the forums relating to that thing, whether powered by Discourse or otherwise. Thanks for replying.