Hi Publii team,
I’ve spent some time over the past year learning and sharing my knowledge on this forum. I really appreciate all the gems found here and how everyone helps each other out.
That said, the WordPress platform used to host this forum presents a number of challenges:
- Unable to save/favourite posts
- Unable to view the posts you’ve made
- Unable to view all of a user’s posts
- No general email updates about forum discussions
- Unable to mention users or view which posts mentioned you
- Unable to DM other users
- Adding code snippets can be a hassle. Often times, the code gets deleted, or doesn’t post properly. I’ve resorted to creating a Gist and posting the link
- Unable to edit/amend/delete posts after a certain time, and no post edit history
- Missing Markdown features
- Difficult to embed images, GIFs, videos to assist in the explanation and assistance
- If you’ve had the forum open for some time and write a post, the post doesn’t go through because you were signed out unknowingly
- Unable to react to/upvote posts
- Limited post filtering/sorting options
- Unable to view context of quote replies (especially for posts with lots of replies)
- No email replies
- No community moderation tools
As the community grows, these features become more and more important. Are there any plans to switch to a more capable forum platform?
I’ve used Discourse for other open source communities, and it’s a solid contender. It’s open-source, and the hosted version even has a free plan for open source projects (although, data migration only exists in their paid plans).
Although discussion platforms like Reddit, Discord, Telegram, and Matrix are nice, they wouldn’t be a good fit for this use case.
