 Time here from Orange Systems, and I want to thank all of you who are a member of my forums. Forums.LaurenSystems.com which I launched in December of 2018 and It's been going really really well. I really started pushing it I should say around January of 2019 and here we are in November of 2020 and this course the platform I chose has been Wonderful to work with so I wanted to answer a couple questions in this video Which basically is what do I use for my forums and I have a video of when I accept this course and I liked it And this is my endorsement further of discourse I'll talk about some of the technical details and some of the challenges that have come with running Discourse and my forums over the last couple years and why I plan to continue using discourse before we dive into that Let's first feel like to learn more about me or my company head over to laurenssystems.com If you'd like to hire short project There's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has There is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page. 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We'll begin here on the about page discourse.org slash about discourse is the 100% open source software platform built for the next decade of internet use Use it as a mailing list discussion forum long form chat room and more and I have a lot of other details on here But one of the things I want to start right here, and this is something very important being a big open source advocate They are uncompromisingly open source and there's only one version of discourse There's not like a pay a little more to get a few extra features version There is just discourse and you can download it and you can host it yourself and maintain total control of how you want to Implement your forums. This is really important because this is not a control You're gonna get if you host it somewhere and I'll use Facebook as an example If you put it on Facebook, you are termed and Conditioned to the way Facebook wants that forum run and then you can apply your rules on top of that But the base rules of course and hosting and your data will essentially be owned by that forum company depending on you know Their policies with discourse you own all of the data, but they do provide hosting Which is why there's a pricing option here. So in case you're wondering is it free? Yes, but the pricing is for those of you that are less technical and don't want to deal with the ins and outs of setting it up You can set up the hosting with discourse and that's their business model The software is free hosting costs something gotta host it somewhere And if you don't want to deal with managing it They have an option for that and by the way, there's no affiliation between me and discourse I mean user of discourse, but I have no affiliate offer or anything This is pricing as of November 2020 as published on their website Now where do I host it because I will have been at least I'm not hosting it with them I am a server admin. So I don't have any problems hosting things myself I set this up as a digital ocean droplet and this is what that forum looks like running on a digital ocean Four gig of memory twenty dollar a month's droplet. That's what digital ocean charges me per month for this particular Instance now I do have an affiliate link fold this closure down below if you do want to sign up for digital ocean And that's actually mentioned because this is how I fund my forums and not that 20 bucks a month is that much But the few clicks I get when people sign up with that affiliate link gives me a credit for digital ocean droplets That credit is then applied towards the discourse droplets or any other droplets I have that I use for demos in my videos and That is kind of how the ecosystem works. So fold this closure on that But as you can tell it doesn't take a ton of horsepower to run now on the back end. This is running Ubuntu 18.04 I have unattended upgrades come on because well I like to make sure it's always up to date and patched all the time because public-facing forums And yes, that's my forums IP address right here, which of course you can get to it forums.laurancesystems.com At any given moment, there's always a tax on there. So if there's a patch that needs to be applied I have them automatically applied which I know some people may find risky But so is having the forums compromised and everyone's data potentially leaked would be a big headache So I make sure this stays up to date But back to the discourse pricing if you don't want to deal with any of that That's the option they have here now as far as installation. I have this installed using their Docker install guide. I believe I've followed their advanced stock or install guide to do some customization One of those important customization pieces is using a mail system So the forums are tied to mail gun, which is a pretty popular outbound mail provider And that's gone really well too. So I've been using this just as long as I've been using discourse So close to two years later and right now this is like a 90 day snapshot It's processed about 35,000 emails with an 85% delivery rate. Sometimes people register bad email addresses in there Or they're having some type of problem. So yeah, there's spikes of undelivered email But overall mail gun has worked really really well and has not really been any type of headache for me It's also a subdomain forums at Lawrence systems comm and I have the proper mail records and SPF records set up With that subdomain for this These are all little details that are really important If you want to get your forums up and running and not just end up in everybody's spam box now I Mentioned only the 10% usage. What does that look like in terms of my forums itself? We head over here We're gonna go to the admin and we'll just jump back for the last year and This is the kind of hits I get on the forum Occasionally, there's videos that are rather popular and right here. We'll see yeah, we had a pretty good spike Let's see if I can get it to mouse over that exact point It's about 10,000. I think users that particular day 10,000 page views. I should say not users Identifies each person that comes in here, but the differences are we have logged in users anonymous users and crawlers Now one of my big reasons for the forums is because many times when I do a video There's questions and the YouTube comment system is well bad And I wanted a way to have a back-and-forth good engaging discussion with people on any of the video and topics I talk about that being said I've managed to build quite the community here of Really smart people that I want to say thank you because many of them have answers even better than mine Two different questions and my forums, of course, are all public anyone can come in here sign up all those You need is valid email address and no this is one of the reasons I use it I'm not selling your email address. I wanted it to be a good community engaged discussion But I did not want to subject you to terms and conditions of whatever different forum place That's why I say at the beginning this course makes that relatively easy to do now as far as the updates go perform upgrades here pretty simple and Whenever there's new commits, here's the Docker manager and to the discourse itself first you update the Docker manager Then you update after that's done this part here relatively straightforward now The only problems I've had in two years of doing updates is sometimes it doesn't seem to prune out the old versions of Docker But that's not too big of a deal because this solution to that is you can run the prune command and get rid of the old Versions that kind of get stuck in there But if you're someone who's not technical savvy and aren't comfortable with setting any of that up Then you may want to look as I said at the hosted version they have on there But overall the upgrades have gone really smooth and provided there's enough space for everything. No problem The upgrades are pretty pain-free. I did run a space once. That's why I learned about pruning completely my fault for not paying attention But before we get off topic, I will mention just general backups They're actually pretty easy to you kick off the backups It has a download option and if I had to do a restore or reupload or take my data, which right now really isn't that much I mean 549 megs not too big once it's compressed and I can upload that to a new instance of The forums if I need to replace this no big deal I keep regular backups of all of this and currently restores disabled They have a really solid method by which you have to go in there and it doesn't let just anyone restore So they've got a process for that I found the documentation good and my overall experience with this whole system has gone really really well And I've still enjoying all the people and community that have been able to engage with me and engage with each other's Well, the forums have been a good place to tie all of that together as well as and if you may have noticed over here when we look at the admin page The number of crawlers that is because many of the topics in the forums can index by the different web search engines Google of course and others and this allows people who are looking for things Which leads to the number of anonymous users that come visit this each day for people looking for a Solution to a problem and finding that solution frequently post in our forums through one of the discussions of how to accomplish something or a tech Question that needed to be answered So I'm going to continue on with using discourse if you're looking at forum software My big thing is I want to recommend this and kind of you know Can't give it an endorsement essentially to say yes, this is the forum software I have been using it has gone really well in the last two years and for the foreseeable future I plan to keep using it the spam moderation has been an absolute minimum They do a good job with all the default systems of detecting whether or not someone's spamming and because you need to use email to register They kind of stops some of the automated systems from really attacking it This is not a challenge by which to say you can't run a system that won't automatically sign up new users and dump a bunch of garbage in There I've just seen a minimal of it in the last couple years I probably don't have to moderate one or two spam messages every week if that it's been pretty minimal So overall I've been really happy with that. Hopefully that doesn't change And they're pretty easy because it puts them in a flag to put some to queue I can delete the user and delete the post which never none of my other users even see in the post It's usually some sign-up offer link for something stupid is the ones that seem to be persistently Showing up on here, but like I said, that's pretty minor problem And was definitely a concern at the beginning two years later hasn't really been a problem which that's turned out really well So thank you to all of you that have signed up for my forums if you are looking to her for a way to engage with me that is the Place to be because that's where I spend at least a couple times a day I go in there and try to reply to everything and I do mean like I'm there all the time Replying engaging not to mention there's a lot of smart people in there So if you have a question, you'll find let me answer it too So this is just my endorsement for discourse kind of a follow-up on what it looks like two years later And I'm excited to see where it's going as we build community around it and all of you join or just find answers and questions You're looking for I don't need your data if you just want to go visit you can completely anonymously surf over to there I don't require a login to view the topics all this is public and to me part of the greater tech Education ecosystem that I like to be part of all right. 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