A rushed forum, my opinion and efforts prior to the launch of keebtalk

Hey guys. I just wanted to offer a bit of info on the choice of Discourse and also some of the assumptions being made about our motives in launching it today.

Firstly, let me say: absolutely, we wanted to move swiftly. Keebtalk has a very specific mission and philosophy, and because we believed deeply in that philosophy, we felt it was important to try to start answering this community need as quickly as possible. It wasn’t for glory; it was because we legit care.

To whatever extent there was value in being first, we wanted to make sure that it was a community-owned, non-profit site that had that distinction. However, the choice of Discourse had nothing to do with a desire for speed. I chose it because I have a lot of experience running a community on Discourse, and I’ve come through lots of experience to trust the design decisions and wisdom of its development team. (In case you guys don’t know, the creator of Discourse is Jeff Atwood, who is himself a keyboard enthusiast and creator of the Code Keyboard.) Yes, hosting is expensive. Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to coming from the forums of the 90s. But I generally think it’s worth the tradeoffs, or at least is worth giving a try for a while. (Data migration is always a thing if we need to switch to something else later.)

Just for street cred, like you @spacewolfplays, I’m also a web developer. Discourse is built on Rails, and I was one of the first people to launch a company using that platform. I subsequently ran a Rails consulting company that did work for all kinds of companies including Microsoft, AMD, Yale, Harvard, etc. I was even quoted in the Wired cover article on Rails. In short: I’ve been dealing with web tech all my life—and Rails in particular.

I also run the most prominent and active online community for people who are into the production design of Star Trek (props, costumes, etc.), which is built on Discourse and has been around for years. In my experience running that community, Discourse has consistently impressed me with its thoughtful design, constant updates, and most importantly its absolutely excellent, semi-automated system of user trust and moderation tools, which for a site like this is going to be super important.

The keyboard community is full of engineers (including me!), and I know the first impulse of engineers is always to build everything super-custom and from scratch. But Discourse has been tested on huge communities around the web and is constantly incorporating feedback from those disparate communities in the updates it regularly pushes. A major advantage is that Discourse is very approachable for new and casual users and power users alike, and I feel that especially the former is really important as the keyboard community grows and welcomes new people.

And for everything else, Discourse is fully extensible through Rails plugins and front-end code. And, fortunately, the keyboard community is full of coders. :slight_smile: As long as we can make sure that our hosting provider allocates enough resources to our server (!), I think we’ll be doing fine.

My recommendation: use the site for a few days and let it settle in on you. I myself found Discourse a little jarring when I first used it (the fact that you highlight text to quote it in in a reply particular). I think once the unfamiliarity wears off you may come, like I did, strongly to prefer it.

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