Bristol Hackspace considering Discourse, what's your experience

#1

Hi South London Makerspace,

I’m from Bristol Hackspace, where we’re considering replacing our google group and wonky old wiki with Discourse like you guys have done, and I’d be very interested in hearing how your experience has gone.

In particular, I’d love to chat to whoever did the set up to make discourse suit the makerspace, and does the ongoing forum admin.

I’m more used to regular old forums, and discourse is something quite different with it’s groups and catagories and tags and badges and trust levels and all sorts. I’m very curious to know what bashing around you did to make it fit.

Hope to hear from you soon!
Matt

#2

@unknowndomain sounds like your bag

#3

@tomnewsom ticks all those boxes!

#4

I wouldn’t use it as documentation, we can talk to you about the ideas we’ve had but broadly the documentation pages are hard to find and we’ve begun a process to replace the use of Discourse with a members handbook. That keeps Discourse just for Forum use.

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#5

Hullo @unknowndomain,

Funny you should say that, I was just admiring your documentation links along the top. What didn’t you like about doing it that way? We currently use a clonky old wiki for ours.

We’re really crap at is maintaining our membership lists and our hackspace joining process is awful, so it’s hard for folks to get in, and we never really know who is and isn’t a member. So one of the reasons I’m looking at forums is that they’ve already got membership management and sign-up processes built in, so we could use it to keep track of who’s who. How would you say discourse would fare in that capacity? Do you use it like that?

Also, do you guys make use of (or subvert) all the ‘trust level’ features at all?

Thanks for getting back so fast!
Matt

#6

Busy day today, but will say more tomorrow.

Long story short: it’s the least bad FOSS forum, and can be as complicated or simple as you want to make it.

Not good enough navigation/search/organisation to use for docs.

#7

Thanks @tomnewsom, I’ll look forward to hearing more tomorrow :slight_smile:

#8

We also have a membership system you could use that would help with this.

We’ve designed it to manage permission on Discourse and have plans for more in future.

#9

I actually just saw that you’d built a management system, and I’m rather interested, but I couldn’t see much details about it anywhere.

Does your membership system share it’s user table with Discourse? I’d love to know more…

#10

no it’s separate but they are linked.

#11

Okay, I find myself with some time now, so here are my thoughts:

Regardless of what software you use, a forum is better than a mailing list for this sort of thing. Moderation, editing, categorisation, formatting - all better.

We chose Discourse 3 years ago because it seemed the most actively developed and user-friendly. It has an API (rather poorly documented, it has to be said, but it is how the JS front end communicates with the Ruby backend, so is always being “dogfooded”) so it can be driven by 3rd parties. It also has good email support (the devs maintain that email should be supported as a 1st-class interactoin method). The dev/user community at meta.discourse.org is excellent

It also supports 3rd party login (twitter, facebook, google, yahoo, github, instagram) which is great for encouraging guests to post.

Permissions (and linking them to our membership system) has been the most important factor I think. Being able to restrict parts of the site to paying members, and allowing various permissions groups to have @handles is impossible with a mailing list.

As for organisation, we suffer from Category sprawl, which is a familiar problem for all forum owners. We could probably slash their number in half and not feel a thing :slight_smile: Tags are enabled, but nobody uses them. IMO, they need curating to work properly and nobody has time for that. General, Private, Off-Topic, Events and Admin is probably your minimum viable set of Categories.

Discourse does have some idiosyncracies - many due to the devs’ aim to encourage high-quality conversations. This can be annoying when you have a pre-built community who don’t need persuading. So you can turn off settings for flood control, minimum post length, duplicate topic titles etc.

Trust Levels are a neat idea. They basically grant “soft” moderation powers to very regular users. Via the API, all paying members are TL3 by default (can move topics and edit titles). You can effectively disable the system by setting the thresholds to ludicrous values.

We’ve done some CSS edits (there is a theming system so you can keep all these edits in one place - they’re non-destructive). Mostly to remove parts of the UI that are only really useful for large forums. You can also use the theming system to insert JS into the /head of every page., which allows for some neat hacks.

Administrating it is part painless, part painful. If you can do it from the Admin pages, it’s a joy, but if you need to install/remove a plugin, or do other low-level malarky, you’re off to the command line. It runs in a docker container, which needs to be rebuilt for evey plugin install/remove. Can take 15m or so. It’s a sophisticated bit of software, not a handful of dumb php files that you can hack at with Notepad.

I’ll leave it there, or this will get hard to read. Long story short: I would recommend it, despite its flaws. I’d be happy to talk more, but I’m off on holiday tomorrow morning. @tomnewsom me on Telegram next Sunday

If you’re in a rush, then I suggest spooling up a cloud server, installing the software and inviting a handful of users to kick the tires. Send me an invite if you do!

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#12

Hi @tomnewsom, thanks for taking the time to write all that out. It’s all very useful. We’ve been playing with discourse a little at this end, and I think we’re going to end up going for it. You’re right, the groups thing looks really useful.

We’re also contemplating knocking together a few scripts to do some basic treasury functions which will then use the API to pop people into and out of appropriate groups. I took a goosey at the app you guys have made to do the same job, but it doesn’t quite fit out funny old ways of doing things.

I probably will have plenty more questions for you when I’ve had a think, but I’m off on holiday in a couple of days too, so that can all wait til we’re all back.

Thanks again for your thoughts,

Matt

#13

Oh, one tiny question, How did you guys get some of your categories to sit along that top menu with neat little icons next to them ?“Rules”, “Tools”, etc?

Cheerio!
Matt

#14

Even if you don’t use our system discourse.js is useful.

#15

You put category/categoryslug in the Top Menu list in settings.

The icons are added with some css:

.nav a[href="/c/tools"]:before {
  content: "\f0ad";
}

Where f0ad is the id of the Font-Awesome glyph

We’re probably going to move our documentation out of discourse. It’s not a proper wiki or docs system. Too restricted.

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