Docker is now the “official” method for installing Discourse, should we use that? It’ll make updating a lot easier, but it’ll take some effort to upgrade. If y’all want to, I’m fine with that. It doesn’t look like it should be that hard to make it work for us. https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker
What are our thoughts on Discourse in general? Feels like adoption and usage is trailing. Is it worth continued investment?
Adoption isn’t doing much because we aren’t pushing it, and I (at least) am not pushing it because I haven’t yet had a moment to figure out if it’s a reasonable replacement for the existing system.
Some questions in my mind:
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When I visit the front page, I get a big list of discussions from all categories. With all of our discussions in here, that would be a bit intimidating.
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There’s about 250 forums on https://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/ . Does the Categories system scale to having 250 categories? If not, how can we subdivide it in a way that’ll make sense to people? Or am I thinking about this wrong?
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It seems I can Star discussions, but not categories (which would be the equivalent to subscribing to an existing forum). If all our stuff was in here, how could I keep track of what I’m interested in?
It’s quite possible there are some features I’ve missed here, but my current impression is that this is built for communities where people have an expectation of being at least aware of everything that happens, and the UI is designed appropriately for that.
Gerv
Hmm. Just noticed the notification prefs, which allow you to subscribe to a category in some way. Must try those out.
Just to pull @yousef in here. Was there much interest when you presented Discourse at that Monday meeting awhile back?
The docker install works pretty well. They’ve made some interesting choices (like using a custom configuration management system called pups), but I prefer them living with their choices rather than me living with my choices.
I currently use this ansible script to get docker + discourse on a server (not 100% finished). The database and uploads are stored in a directory outside of docker, so you data persist across updates.
You should be able to setup a fresh docker install, ssh into the container, load a database dump, detroy the container and bootstrap it again and then you should be good to go. (Assuming file uploads are going to S3 atm)
Front page can be customized to our needs with the list of categories in a fashion way, check how newrelic guys are doing:
About the subscribe thing, there is a bug somewhere about adding also a button to each category page to ease the task of subscribing. The good thing is that we can hack around and implement what we feel is needed for us, but we need more people sending using it and sending feedback to community IT.
That new Relic page looks interesting, but their front page still only surfaces 30 categories. Perhaps that’s OK; some categories are things you’ll eventually get pointed to by other people.
You say we can hack around: I know we have people maintaining our Discourse instance, but do we also have people interested in hacking on it?
I agree, that’s the stage we’re on. We have had enough people using Discourse that we know there are some things we’d change. Now we need to see how successful we can be about getting those things changed.
Do you remember were is the list of things we want to improve?
Maybe we should share them with more people (ruby devs) and point to a document about how to hack this instance so we can get an overview about how many mozillians can help with hacking.
In any case, we need a page at the wiki to sum up how to use it, how to request a new category, how to help with hacking…