 So we now have officially launched forums. So I'm excited about this. And I chose the discourse platform. I know people had done some suggestions. This one actually came up a lot in emails I've received from people for a suggestion for the forum platform. I do see a lot of other companies using it. And I do really like the platform. And that's why we went with it. It's open source. It has data liberation so I can bring my data and take it out of here if I don't like them. Also, I can self host it, which I actually am doing. I'm not self hosting it in our office though because the bandwidth requirements, I think that would exceed them quickly and I didn't want to go through the trouble of setting it up here and then setting it up again in somewhere like digital ocean which is where it's living right now. So we set this up and I did look at their pricing which I don't think is unreasonable because there's a lot that goes into hosting forums and there's a lot of things in there but I wanted a challenge of doing it myself. So for those of you just screaming you're just a cheapskate every time I mention anything open source, no, I don't mind paying for product at all. I don't mind donating to open source projects but I do really like owning the data and not being beholden to another platform. And this is why we started on Facebook originally but I didn't really, my heart was never really in it because I know I'm living and playing on their platform and subject to their rules which are also subject to change at a whim. And that's where I went with discourse because I like when the rules, if discourse changes the rules I have the software I can then start seeking another solution and the market demand will cause another solution to appear if for some reason discourse closed source all this and quit doing it, someone would just fork it because well the code's open source. Anyways, so there is the option that you can host it themselves and the cool thing is if I ever needed to move over to their hosting I can just back up the forums. They have a really simple import export for all the data that's created in the forums and import it into the hosted or if I don't want it on a digital hosting server I can simply take the server, reload discourse wherever I want to load it and then install that image, not image but the backup file and it's restored, pretty straightforward. As far as the install discourse it was pretty straightforward. There's two ways to do it. You can, if you want, this is built on a platform referred to as well as several platforms actually. This is built with Redis, it's built with Ruby on Rails, it's built with EmberJS and Postgres.sql. If you're familiar with all of those, they have also lots of what they refer to as RubyGems. They have a complete less than the gem master file. So these are all the little pieces if you wanted to compile all the source code yourself you can and I like the fact that they offer this but I am not a developer in those languages and I didn't feel like going through the trouble so I followed the how do I install discourse, beginner guide to install with Docker. This is simple, it's easy. If you just wanna play with this it's pretty straightforward to do. You simply go ahead and install Docker on a loaded Linux server that supports Docker for example Ubuntu, Ubuntu server. Then you make a discourse directory and then you just go ahead and create the Docker image that you pull from them and you can just do a git pull and pull it in there. Your instructions are great, it does what it says. Now if you're not familiar with Docker it's similar to virtualization but it actually runs sharing the kernel with the host operating system and it uses what they refer to as a YAML file to do the configuration so you have the Docker image but it reaches out to the YAML file when it gets built and that's where you put your configuration settings and when you run through the setup that they have their discourse setup it builds the YAML file. Now I have over here mail gun open and this is where a critical piece of this is the email portion. Now I use G Suite for my business it just great business email it does a great job of spam filtering it does a great job of sending emails and avoiding spam but it was a scalability problem there's rate limits of how many emails I can send today so I chose mail gun as the back end this requires a little bit of additional setup so there's the server side setup and then there is creating SPF records and you really should do this as a sub domain because having SPF records that say mail gun and G Suite or mail gun and your other company send out your emails that can be problematic. So we chose to use mail gun we set up an SPF record for this and you can see right away not that these are a lot it's only the scale hasn't gone too off the charts but right away it's sending emails. Now the other thing too is there's some temporary fails in here that's the constant challenge it takes time to build your mail reputation for the systems to realize that it's not some spam those are other little challenges when setting this up so even though I have the SPF record and I have the proper settings in here it still caught some of these things as spam Yahoo seemed to flag it as spam in the first couple of emails and now it does that so I had to do a little testing and things like that that's just gonna take time to get over but overall I'm happy with the way it works it's pretty slick it doesn't seem to take up much processor or memory I've been watching it we have Zavix monitoring our digital ocean droplet for this and here is me logged into the server fully running and with a few dozen users that are on here it's only using 1.3 gigs of RAM out of the two gigs I have assigned to it but once again it's in digital ocean I could simply stop this server add more memory, add more processors as needed but so far it seems to be working quite well it all seems relatively fast going through and looking at different things in the forums I'm also gonna look for some feedback from all of you for what we'd like to see in these forums right away someone had suggested a chat room the problem I have with the chat room is whether or not I have time to maintain it or actually be present in it my general rule is I go through and reply to people's messages as needed when I have time and I'll spend a while going through there replying to everyone and then I go back to working on my other projects chat rooms require much longer time of interaction which I don't always have but I'm still looking at this I'm thinking actually IRC because I use IRC already and maybe I'll have an IRC room for this and there's web enabled versions of IRC rooms but either way if you've seen another forum that's also using discourse discourse does have plug-in support so if there's other plug-ins that you would suggest let me know I'm still learning I'm learning with you and learning all how this works because I've not managed forums in a long, long time probably since the BBS days I don't do much management on forums I mostly just participate in them on different platforms but I wanted this to be a place where we talk about the videos and get more in depth where people had questions about them and if you're curious about something or something we talk about firewalls I've got categories for networking and firewalls, business talk some tech news, a computer and hardware builds people want to know when we do some of the builds for some of the servers or things like the unified video servers we'll have discussions in there about them it's probably not going to be the most active place in terms of gaming computer builds my staff is in here and they will maybe answer questions about that but I'm like the worst person to ask about any gaming computers because I just don't do a lot of computer gaming a matter of fact my staff helped build my last computer maybe that takes my tech cred down a notch but I'm much more of a networking firewall guy but at least I'll be posting videos here to help further discussion, interaction and someone had asked about two factor authentication yes discourse has it that was not a great criteria they had so if you're interested in joining the forums feel free to join them it's all set up live and working it's always going to be a work in progress and I do welcome feedback of what I'm getting right what I'm getting wrong and where we should go next with this because it's going to grow together with all of us on this channel thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video go ahead and hit the thumbs up if you want to see more content from my channel go ahead and hit subscribe and the bell icon and hopefully YouTube will send you a notice if you're interested in contracting launch systems for any type of IT services work or consulting work go ahead and head over to launchsystems.com and fill out our contact and get in touch with us if you would like to help the channel out in other ways you can use our affiliate links below in the description or we have a link directly to our launch systems page where we have a list of different affiliate offers and it's very appreciated if you use any of those for signing up any of the services and many of them offer you discounts if you want to head over to our forums there'll be a link in the description for our forums wherever they may be because we've been looking at different forum platforms but they'll always be relevantly linked right there all right once again thanks leave some feedback and comments below on this video if you loved it if you hated it I try to reply to everyone the people who hate and the people who love them so thank you very much and see you next time