What are Rust's Discourse hosting plans and time requirement?

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1

Hello there,

The OCaml community is having a discussion right now about its communication channels -- apparently "mailing-list + IRC" suggests "old-school" to some people. Rust is notable for its adoption of the Discourse platform as main community place (you also have a nice lively Reddit and IRC); I asked around about and heard good experiences from rustaceans about Discourse, but I would be interested in some more practical details.

  1. How is Rust's Discourse instance hosted? Are you using any of the hosting plans that Discourse-the-company is offering, or their "one-time install" option, or another option? What are you estimates on the monthly cost of maintaining of same-order-of-magnitude-size Discourse install?

  2. How would you evaluate the administrative work requirements? Would a Discourse instance be manageable by a single hobbyist volunteer, or do you need a team to wake up at night to fight the new spamming strategy? (I'm not asking about discussion moderations which I guess grow with the size as everywhere, but rather about the less visible "administration" parts.)

If you have any high-level feedback on the use of Discourse for a language community, I'm of course all ears.

Thanks in advance.

2

We're using an instance hosted by discourse themselves; we don't run the
infrastructure.

3

@ben can probably give insight. He has a lot of experience with Discourse.

4

We have two hosted instances, each on the business plan. We were an early user and appear to have a significant discount.

We spend little time on administration. Discourse's spam filter seems to work well. Sometimes new users posts will get flagged and you get pinged and have to click something. For major problems, Discourse staff (shoutout @neil) is responsive.

It sounds to me like you are leaning toward running it yourselves, but if you have budget I'd recommend using hosted Discourse. Maintaining your own infrastructure sucks.

I've been happy with both the product and the team behind it.

1 Like
5

Thanks a lot for the feedback, that's very useful.

(Re. discounts: I'm told that Discourse is still ready to consider discounts for open-source projects.)