I need to build a dictionary from English to my native language. Today, when I was thinking about how to do it, I was thinking If it might be a good idea to host it by discourse. At first glance, I realized that it has some advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are mainly the ones that we are using discourse. It enables people to contribute and discuss things in the dictionary using discourse functionalities. On the other hand, discourse sorts most clicked links to the page and from it, below the topic. So it might create a stickiness for users to follow these links to find related words or topics and reduce bounce rate.
However, it also has some downsides and its mostly related to performance. First discourse is really heavy when its loaded for the first time. And I would say its a very serious downside for a dictionary. Second I’m really concerned about having tens of thousands of topics that are heavily linked together. As you might know in any online dictionary, words from examples are linked to their own pages. So if I want to also do that, each topic which is mainly for one word, might have tens of links to other topics. and might get hundreds of links from other topics (if the word is so commonly used).
So I wanted to ask the community 1- whether this idea makes sense at all? and 2- If I might see a whopping drop in performance because of the heavy internal links between different words and topics.
AI-generated summary
The original poster, hosna, is considering using Discourse to host a dictionary from English to their native language. They’ve identified advantages, such as enabling user contributions and discussions, as well as potential stickiness due to Discourse’s linking functionality. However, they’re concerned about performance issues, including slow load times and the potential impact of tens of thousands of heavily linked topics. They’re seeking feedback on whether this idea is feasible and if performance will be significantly affected. codinghorror has already expressed skepticism about the suitability of Discourse for this purpose.
It doesn’t sound like a good fit to me.
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