[markplindsay]

I had a lot of trouble keeping Discourse running on my own. There are a lot of moving parts and a ton of configuration to keep track of. Making changes or even updating the instance were tasks I dreaded because of the likelihood something would break. It requires a lot of system resources. I like Docker a lot in many situations, but with Discourse it only seemed to reduce visibility into the problems I was having.

I have to say the folks on meta.discourse were helpful though.

In the end, the users decided—I ended up integrating a Mailman 3 server with the website, and we're in the process of switching over to it. The users preferred the simplicity of LISTSERV-style mailing lists over a web forum. This probably would've happened no matter the choice of forum software, but I can't help but think Discourse's unpleasant UX played a part in them reaching that consensus.

[Macha]

You must have a fairly techie and older audience. I have to say as harsh as I've been on Discourse in this thread, I'd still take it over listserv.

[markplindsay]

Yes, academics who (generally) started their careers in the 1990s and are used to listserv-style communication. They kept wanting to interact with Discourse through email, but it wasn't the experience they were looking for.

[int_19h]

I have a Discourse forum that I run on my own, and it has been a fairly pleasant experience overall. Initial installation was a bit problematic because of a bug that they have that doesn't properly handle # in mail server password (https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-app-yml-doesnt-like-e...) - it so happened that my mail password was auto-generated, and did contain that symbol in it. But other than that, it all went pretty smooth.

I've done a few updates, and it was all entirely via the web interface, with a single click on "Update" button and watching it do its thing. Zero issues so far.

I'm not sure what you mean by "ton of configuration". It seems like most things just worked the way they were set up out of the box. I keep fiddling with various user- and posting-related settings, but that's mostly out of curiosity more than any kind of need.

[trustfundbaby]

Interesting. I was able to get Discourse running ... on heroku no less, and I haven't had to futz with it in the months since. It just hums along on its own, but then again I'm a pretty experienced Ruby/rails engineer.