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Once you decide to start a community you have to decide which forum software to use. Choosing the best forum software depends on your specific needs, such as ease of use, customization, and community features. Here are some popular options: Discourse: Modern and user-friendly, with features like real-time discussions, mobile support, and extensive plugins. phpBB: A classic, open-source forum software that is highly customizable and has a large community. Vanilla Forums: Offers both open-source and paid versions, known for its clean interface and integration options. Flarum: A lightweight and modern forum software that is easy to set up and customize. Simple Machines Forum (SMF): A robust and flexible option with a strong community and a wide range of modifications. MyBB: Free and open-source, it provides a good balance of features and ease of use. NodeBB: Built on Node.js, it offers real-time discussions and a modern interface, suitable for tech-savvy users. XenForo: A premium option known for its powerful features and excellent support, ideal for larger communities. Consider your requirements regarding scalability, features, and budget when choosing the right software for your forum. My personal favorite is xenForo. I do like Discourse and in the future I will create a forum using it.

We are excited to announce that in addition to Enterprise, all Discourse AI features are now available on Standard and Business, excluding the Starter plan. What this means is if you have the Discourse AI plugin enabled, you should now be able to see all the related site settings for all features. This is a big change and we hope this opens the doors to more people using Discourse AI. Please note we are still in the process of updating the website and documentation 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

While Discourse is widely recognized as powerful open-source forum software, Discourse has also served as our primary workplace/team collaboration tool from the very beginning. Many other companies and organizations have found incredible value in using it the same way. In this blog post, we share insights on how companies, research labs, and other groups that need spaces to collaborate can effectively use Discourse to support discussions that are worth remembering. Why teams choose Discourse for collaboration This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2024/10/discourse-a-team-collaboration-tool 6 posts - 4 participants Read full topic View the full article

Current Projects - October 2024 Welcome to our second edition of Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. Your questions and feedback are welcome! Kicking off Composer redesign Our composer redesign project is still in its early stages, but we’re getting closer to defining our design direction and choosing the libraries that we’ll be building upon. After evaluating our options, three contenders bubbled to the top: Lexical, ProseMirror, and TipTap. We did some earlier prototyping with Lexical, but ProseMirror looks compelling, and its recent adoption by some larger projects addresses some of our earlier concerns about it. We are currently working on a prototype based on ProseMirror to validate some assumptions we have about what that integration would look like. A new look and feel config page Our work on a new theme chooser is evolving into a slightly larger project to create a more streamlined config page in the admin interface for customizing the look abd feel of a Discourse site. In addition to giving admins on new sites an easier and more visual way to choose from a small set of selected themes, we’ll also be looking at how sites configure theme components, color schemes, and related settings. We are close to landing an initial pull request for this new page, which will remain hidden until it is in a state where we’re ready to roll it out more widely. In full swing Admin interface design consistency We’ve arrived at some new patterns for the design of config pages within the admin interface, that group related sites settings and other configuration together in on applying our new guidelines to the pages we’ve recently added for the new about page and custom user fields. Switching our hosted plans to browser page view metrics We’re working on rolling out our new page view metrics for our hosted plans, and updating plan limits accordingly, so that traffic from bots and crawlers will no longer be counted as page views towards a site’s usage, relieving site admins of the responsibility to manage that traffic. Simplifying invites We’re making invites more discoverable and simplifying some of the more common flows for inviting users. AI summaries for hot topics We’re still in the thick of our work to add an experimental feature to allow sites to include short summaries of topics on the hot topic list itself. We’re close to landing an initial change to allow topics to store multiple types of summaries, each using a different prompt. New full screen pages for signup and login We’re following up on our earlier improvements to signup and login and changing these screens from modals to full screen pages. We’ve merged this new feature behind the experimental_full_page_login feature flag for backwards compatibility with existing themes that customize these screens while they make updates to be compatible with the new pages. Ability to limit where Personas can interact and which LLMs they can use We’re working on a change to limit where individual AI personas can interact and which LLMs they can use. This enables you to create more limited personas that are available to larger groups of members while managing costs. A more extensible topic list We’re continuing to work on a new topic list implementation with a focus on extensibility developer experience. We have been testing this internally since May and our next goal is to be in a state where we can start testing the new implementation on Meta. We are in the process of updating many themes and plugins to use new APIs, in order to take that next step towards rolling it out more widely, Wrapping up New about page design We recently shipped a new design for the about page behind a feature flag. We’re still tidying up a few loose ends but will soon be unconditionally switching sites over to the new design. Learn more… Allowing chat threads in direct messages We’ve added the ability to turn on threading in chat direct messages, to enable more structured conversations among small groups when they need it. Switching themes and plugins from yarn to pnpm Following up on our recent work to switch core over from yarn to pnpm, which brings gains in speed and storage requirements for building Discourse, we’ve been doing the same within all of the themes and plugins that we maintain. Add upload support to custom AI tools Custom AI tools now support uploaded documents, and an API to search them, enabling you to create tools with access to additional knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that multiple personas can access. Ability to flag and hide posts as spam with AI triage automation We’ve added the ability to flag posts as spam with the AI triage automation, which also hides the post automatically. Previously, we only allowed individual posts to be sent to the review queue or entire topics to be hidden. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic View the full article

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When I look at Discourse, I see Circle and Mighty Networks. Discourse is software you can install on your own server or through their hosting plans. Circle and Mighty Network are SaaS communities. You pay to be on their hosting plans, and you can't move away from them. But Circle and Mighty look just like Discourse's model and structure. It makes me wonder if they copied...

You can fire up a docker container on an Linux distro. To install Discourse, follow these general steps: [HEADING=2]Prerequisites[/HEADING] Server Requirements: A server with Ubuntu 20.04 or later. At least 1 GB of RAM (2 GB recommended). A domain name. [*]Install Docker:Discourse runs in a Docker container, so you'll need to have Docker installed. [HEADING=2]Installation Steps[/HEADING] Access Your Server: Log into your server via SSH: ssh username@your_server_ip Install Docker:If Docker isn't already installed, run: sudo apt update sudo apt install -y docker.io sudo systemctl start docker sudo systemctl enable docker Install Git:If you don't have Git installed, do so by running: sudo apt install -y git Clone the Discourse Docker Repository: git clone [url='https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker. git[/code] </pre><li>[b]Run the Discourse Setup[/b]:Use the provided setup script: [code]cp samples/standalone.yml containers/app.yml[/code [*][b]Edit the Configuration[/b]:Open app.yml and configure your settings, such as the hostname and email settings: [code]nano containers/app.ymLaunch Discourse:Start the Discourse application with: sudo ./launcher bootstrap app sudo ./launcher start app Access Discourse:Open your web browser and go to http://your_domain_or_ip to complete the setup. [HEADING=2]Post-Installation[/HEADING] Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your Discourse admin account. Configure additional settings as needed through the Discourse admin panel. [HEADING=2]Additional Resources[/HEADING] For detailed installation instructions, refer to the official Discourse installation guide. If you encounter any issues, feel free to ask for help!