What does HackerNews think of discourse?

A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.

Language: Ruby

#25 in JavaScript
#9 in PostgreSQL
#1 in Rails
#4 in Ruby
Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, any time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

Discourse is free software [0], you can simply host it elsewhere, the pricing you're looking at is their managed option, which while convenient absolutely isn't necessary.

[0]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

From the HTML source code:

    
There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1]

[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

> Best solution? Most easily maintained?

We apply the Occam's razor here. For a given problem, a smaller program that solves the problem is a preferred solution. It is not a very good metric, and it is fine to disagree with it. But getting a "best" solution, requires one to define what "best" is, and there is no such agreed definition for code.

> The majority of "useful" tests either are stand-ins for what the language should have given you anyways (proper type checking), or they find and fix known bugs, e.g. the intersection of three features.

Find and fix known bugs is one aspect of it. You are not accounting the entire philosophy of test driven development, where one specifies functionality as tests upfront, and later writes code to pass those tests. Anyhow, we have found large projects like Discourse [1], Gitlab [2], Diaspora [3] have tests that specify code behavior well enough so that RbSyn can synthesize them. Very few tests are type-checking, bug fixing and intersection of 3 features.

[1]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse [2]: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq [3]: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.