User Forum Discourse

It would be nice to have real user forum like Discourse.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Opening a user forum needs additional attention and a care taker.

Discourse can be configured to work also like a mailing list see https://talk.libreho.st/t/how-to-use-discourse-for-mailing-list-dwellers/519

We already can use fairchat channels like a forum with threading and a mailing list and even embed that into a web page like we do here https://www.fairkom.eu/mitwirken

Discourse is a mature discussion software with several plugins. Here we list some that may be relevant to Display Europe.

• AI support https://www.discourse.org/plugins/ai.html -- https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai/259214
• Chat integration (e.g. to matrix) https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-chat-integration/66522
• SSO https://www.discourse.org/plugins/oauth.html
• Vote favourite topics https://www.discourse.org/plugins/topic-voting.html
• Gamifictaion https://www.discourse.org/plugins/gamification.html
• Up / downvote https://www.discourse.org/plugins/post-voting.html
• Translations, also with LibreTranslate https://github.com/discourse/discourse-translator
• ActivityPub https://meta.discourse.org/t/following-an-activitypub-actor/314580

All can be self-hosted.

@oliver.maklott @jonas.liebst

There is also a WP plugin https://github.com/discourse/wp-discourse which adds a comment section. Here is an example page (scroll down, it is a long article) https://blog.discourse.org/2024/07/celebrating-discourse-3-3/

discourse on kubernetes

There seems no ready made helm or kustomze chart.

We can use launcher to build an image ./launcher start-cmd will give you the settings you need to start the image. The image should embed plugins.

Instructions see https://meta.discourse.org/t/installing-on-kubernetes/49329/38

Some more hints https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-up-an-internal-team-forum-in-half-a-day-using-discourse-b13588d907fe/

@jan.krammer could you estimate how much time you would need to create the kustomize charts for a dev overlay?

maybe it makes sense to evaluate different tools with pros and cons before starting installing, setting up and then figuring out that another tool might be better.

I created this one https://git.fairkom.net/emb/displ.eu/fediverse so we can research and work here to tackle the fediverse challenge

We have set up a dev environment for discourse https://git.fairkom.net/emb/displ.eu/fediverse/discourse/-/blob/main/README.md

mentioned in issue emb/displ.eu/fediverse/discourse#4 (closed)

marked this issue as related to emb/displ.eu/fediverse/discourse#4 (closed)

assigned to @jan.krammer

Canonical maintains a discourse operator https://github.com/canonical/discourse-k8s-operator/issues

Discourse Bitnami version

Docs with all env variables https://github.com/bitnami/containers/blob/main/bitnami/discourse/README.md

This is our k8s deployment chart https://git.fairkom.net/hosting/k8s-deployments/discourse-bitnami# and we got a dev instance working on https://discourse.dev.osalliance.com/