How much effort is it to run a Discourse board for a small group?

I’m in the leadership of a group of about 700 people and we need a way to communicate amongst ourselves, like a message board, with different threads.

We have been using Signal for the past year, but it’s cumbersome. Many of our members (who trend older: 55+) don’t like it or have a hard time with it. As a result only about 10-15% of members use it. Another problem is that it doesn’t show new members anything that was posted before they joined.

Naturally, for a 20-plus-year user of SDMB like me, a Discourse board seems a perfect solution, and the pricing is within our means. My question is, what should I expect the workload to be once I’ve set it up?

It would be a private board: only registered members of our group would be allowed in. (I assume it could be set up so as not to show up in search results?)

What are the pros and cons of Discourse? Are there other platforms I should consider?

We also looked into groups.io a while ago, and set up a test there, but never followed through. Can anyone compare the admin effort needed for each?

I can only compare Discourse to vBulletin as those are the only two platforms I am familiar with.

If you are willing to pay for Discourse to host your board, the daily workload is fairly light. Discourse is fairly good about filtering off spam, which required a lot more moderator effort under vBulletin.

One pro is that Discourse is actively being developed and maintained. This means that bugs get fixed, and new features get implemented. On the other hand, one con is that Discourse is actively being developed and maintained, which means that things your users like may change, and admin/moderator screens can change drastically.

By default, Discourse expects the board to be largely self-moderating. It is set up with trust levels, and users that have built up “trust” are given certain mod powers. Exactly what users can and can’t do depends on their trust level and how you’ve set up each trust level in the admin control panel. Discourse’s “like” feature is an integral part of this trust system, so you can’t have a “like” button unless you have the entire trust system to go with it. We have dedicated moderators and don’t want users to have mod powers, so we have mostly disabled the trust system here. It can be tricky to disable the trust system, as we found out the hard way when users were accidentally promoted to higher trust levels shortly after we switched to Discourse here.

There are hooks for advertising and all sorts of stuff, but I’m not involved in any of that and can’t really comment on it. I also can’t answer your question about search results, as that type of stuff was initially set up here by TubaDiva and is currently managed by someone (who I am not going to name) at STM. There is a fair amount of documentation available online if you want to see what sorts of things you have available in the admin control panel.

One thing that we have run into is that certain email systems don’t seem to like Discourse very much and will filter off messages from our system. They don’t even send them to the user’s spam folder. They just poof them off into the cornfield. This can be very annoying when you’re trying to get a password reset email to a user. Yahoo is our main problem with this. Most other major email providers work fine.

Some users don’t like change. Even when your message board is completely crashing to a halt several times a day and constantly fails in various spectacular ways, some people will complain that you have completely ruined the board when you switch to something that actually works. So if you are switching from a functional board to another functional board, expect more of this sort of thing.

I run a small, and not very active Discourse site. I do both parts of administering the Discourse discussions, and running the back end computers that host the Discourse software. It sounds like you’re planning to pay for a Discourse site, which takes away the back-end parts. Those are actually pretty easy for anyone who is familiar with managing Linux systems.

Initial configuration of the message board itself will take time. That is making all the settings of titles, names, logos, categories, tags, permissions, and those types of things. If you know what you want, that will help a great deal. There is still going to be the time of playing with the software to make what you want into what exists.

Expect that step will take a minimum of several hours, but when you add in the time to familiarize yourself with how exactly you do things plan to spend 10+ hours. Lots of that may be on things like creating multiple versions of your logo in different aspect ratios. If you don’t care about that kind of detail, it might go much faster.

If you want different permissions for different groups of users you may have to create that. This is different than mods and stuff. It would be if you have people in the (riffing of your username) people in the “semi-colon” group can see the mid-sentence category, and those in the “question mark” group can see the end-sentence category. It’s best to plan this out ahead of time because…

Inviting all of the users is mostly easy. You can upload a csv file with a list of email addresses, and what each user’s primary group should be. Discourse will send out invitations. This step is extremely unforgiving. It’s just going to do it. If you have mistakes, like you created the group “semi-colon”, but have in the csv file “semicolon”, it won’t halt, it will send the invitation, but not put people in the right groups. Then you get to spend time manually adjusting 700 users.

Or maybe you just don’t do groups at all. Other than mods, I don’t think SDMB does groups.

Yeah, also the whole trust level stuff. On my end I adjusted it so new users can post, but as they rise through the trust levels they don’t get any new privileges. So like SDMB, I mostly subverted the trust system. I do use groups to give certain users junior-mod type abilities, like moving posts from one category to another.

To keep your content off search engines, you can set categories to only be readable by logged in users, and you can block self-creation of accounts. New users are invitation only, or need to be manually approved. Search engines will be able to find your site, but shouldn’t be able to index any of the actual content.

To me, the biggest thing is switch in feel between a message board, like Discourse or vBulletin, and a chat system like Signal. It’s really going to depend what type of interaction your group is going to prefer. Other options may be things like Discord or Slack.

Agree with everything that’s been said already. Echoing echoreply (), I also administer a Discourse board, and day to day it’s almost zero work. Once in a while I have it autoupdate to the latest stable version — and that’s only because we self-host it to save money. If you pay the developer company to host it for you (I can never remember their name… garden of eden creation kit or something?), there’s even less work as they manage the entire backend for you.

And 1000% agreed on getting rid of the “trust levels” stuff. Test it out with a few friends (or fake accounts) first to make sure you did it right and users don’t accidentally become moderators after a few posts.

That said, though… if the SDMB is any indication, many of our users still do struggle with Discourse’s functionality, especially when they push out mandatory changes.

Something like Google Groups would be both easier but also a lot messier/noisier (it’s a shit ton of emails by default, and precious few people know how to either use the web interface version or else change to a daily digest model).

Facebook Groups might be another option, but then you exclude the non-Facebook users. I’m also not sure if it supports up to 700 people.

Discord’s pricing is more advantageous, but it’s pretty “gamified” and has constant nags to buy “nitro” boosts for your “server”, which might be confusing for some users.

Slack’s free plan makes messages disappear after 90 days, and the paid plans are per-user so it might get pretty expensive. There might be nonprofit discounts available if that’s applicable.

No longer works with my old computer, and I worry that it’ll quit working with the old iPad.

If the small group you’re working with routinely gets new computers, that won’t be an issue. If not, watch out.

As one of the admins for a few groups.io groups (that always sounds redundant– “a few groups.io”?), I can tell you that the admin for those is pretty easy. But they’re not super-high traffic, don’t have controversy, and aren’t growing rapidly, so my experience might not be representative.

At the risk of stating the obvious, have at least two admins. We’ve all seen groups die because an admin lost interest or, well, died and there was no backup.

(looks around sheepishly)
A (very) few of us worry about that for the SDMB too… What if the SDMB goes dark? Should we make a contingency plan?

Thanks for all the replies.

I don’t suppose moderation will take much time with a mostly like-minded, invitation-only group of 700, not all of whom will be active on the board?

Just for comparison, how many active members does the SDMB have and how many moderators?

According to Discourse, we had approximately 1200 active users in the last week.

We have 10 moderators (though a couple of these aren’t very active).

Thanks.

And roughly how much time to mods spend modding per day/week?

It varies dramatically. For me, quiet days means maybe 20-40 minutes. Add an “event” such as Charlie Kirk, ICE shootings, Luigi Mangione’s attack on the CEO, or any other stress inducing topics, and it can be 2-3 Hours in a single day (checking flags, reading enough posts to make sense of the flags, writing notes or warnings, posting in ATMB about the same).

Not that the community isn’t worth it… And honestly, while P&E/GD (mostly the former) draw a lot of aggro, they rules are pretty clear and enforceable most of the time, while other forums may be less crazy, but have fuzzier rules requiring more flexibility on the part of the mod.

Anyway, absent a crisis say 3 hours a week for me.

Great info; I had wondered how much time y’all were putting in. And vexation, let’s not forget volunteering for massive vexation. Heros the lot of you.

As to our OP’s use case for a message board, ISTM it matters hugely what the purpose of the board is and what the purpose of the membership is. If their board is going to turn into a virtual “watering hole”, then the demands get as big and as testy as the group decides to be. If the board is all business about the business of the organization sponsoring it, that’ll be better.

People being people, you’ll always be herding cats some. But the more the motivation to post content is about functional stuff, not just whinging or fat-chewing, the easier it’ll be.

Very true, and our local pen club is looking for another solution for that reason (although there is no formal structure of “people in charge” to support it). It is mostly used to call meetings, to ask for pen help from members, occasionally to sell stuff. Very low traffic, maybe a few posts per week.

I don’t think that’s a problem. I belong to a few Facebook Groups that have well over that many members.

Thanks for the kind thoughts. Though remember I gave a huge degree of variation, so I’m not sure how much help it’ll be. Our little corner of the internet is quite a bit different after all!

But a major shout out to @What_Exit and other chronologically forward mods for making my workload easier, by fixing many/most problems before I’m awake!

I bring this up in part for @commasense because part of having a larger group of mods is to cover more days of the week and time zones!

Also consider Discord, which is sort of in between something like Signal chats and this. It’s pretty easy to set up and maintain, and it’s free. If you want to see what it looks like, DM me and I’ll send you an invitation to a small private discord server, to give you a sense of what you can do with it.

This message board takes a lot of moderation in part because people talk about controversial topics. (And also, because this board doesn’t allow users to edit their posts, so there’s a lot of “can you fix this topic title” that would just be handled by users in the default mode.) If you have a board to talk about knitting (as an example) and set clear rules for allowed behavior, especially if you don’t let people talk about politics, moderation is easy.

I also moderate another board where, after banning a handful of difficult users, there’s nearly no moderation beyond deleting spam from time to time. That one has most of the trust system set as the default, and honestly, it mostly works fine.