Discourse

Discourse (part of the Webforums subcommittee)
Status	Special case
Archiving status	Unknown (manual)
Archiving type	other
IRC channel	#msgbored (on hackint)

Discourse is a forum/Q&A hybrid. It is both an open-source forum software and a forum hosting service.

The Good

Discourse markets itself as a concoction of the good collaborative environment of old-school forums, and the interactivity of modern websites. It's also open-source, you can run a Discourse forum of your own.

The Bad

Discourse also offers hosting for a very hefty price (~$100 per month). As such, it's very possible that anyone who's using their hosting for their forum could chicken out at any minute, meaning their forum is incredibly volatile. See the Known Victims section for further details.

Archiving

A default Discourse instance uses incremental IDs for channels, topics and replies. There will most likely be instances with exemptions, utilising other ID systems.

• The "/c/" path is for categories. For example, "https://community.cloudflare.com/c/57" is a "What's New" category on Cloudflare Community.
• The "/t/" path is for topics. For example, "https://forum.opencv.org/t/7" is a welcome post on the OpenCV Forum.
• The "/u/" path is for users. For example, "https://forum.snapcraft.io/u/igor" is a user who was suspended until 2050 for no longer being an employee at Canonical.

To get topics as a JSON with cooked HTML text and other verbose variables, you can use "/t/*.json" (e.g. "https://ytpmania.net/t/15378.json"). You can also get JSON for categories ("https://community.cloudflare.com/c/whats-new/57.json") and users ("https://forum.snapcraft.io/u/igor.json").

The raw markdown text of a topic can be saved with the "/raw/" path ("https://devforum.roblox.com/raw/40471").

A JSON or raw text of a topic can be limited to a certain amount of replies; you can add a reply number to the URL to get a singular reply ("https://discourse.lubuntu.me/raw/3528/9").

A URL that only uses numbers will redirect to a URL with the name included (e.g. "https://forum.opencv.org/t/7" will lead to "https://forum.opencv.org/t/welcome-to-opencv-forum/7"). This does not apply to "/raw/" and "/t/*.json" paths.

ArchiveBot Usage

Discourse works "reasonably well" in ArchiveBot. Currently it is not covered by the forums igset and may be run without an igset. Playback works in the WBM but JS must be disabled.

Many Discourse instances seem to be rate limited so that they will return 429s after a few minutes even with default parameters. But they do recover quickly and seem to be fine with -concurrency 2 -d 500.

Notable Discourses

At Risk

• Twitter Developers Forum

May be phased out with new API. Last reachable May 4, 2023.

• Homebrew

Went read-only on 1 January 2021, migrating to GitHub Discussions.

• Test Cafe

Went read-only on 25 May 2018, migrated to Stack Overflow.

Active Discourses

• Brave Community
• Cardano Forums
• CerealLand Forums
• CG Society
• Chapel Developers Community
• Civils.ai Developers Community
• Chia̍h pá ·bē! Taiwanese Language Community
• clockworkpi
• Cloudflare Community
• Codechef Discuss
• DataSHIELD forum
• Discourse Meta
• Discuss CESM
• DreamHost Community
• Elastick Stack
• Envato's Forums
• Ethereum Research Forum
• Expo Forum
• fastai Forums
• FIRST community
• Fiverr
• Free Code Camp
• Go Lang Forums
• GitHub Community
• Hugging Face
• Hugo Community
• Humane Tech Community
• It's FOSS Community
• Joplin Forum
• Julia
• Jupyter
• Kayıp Rıhtım Forum (in Turkish)
• Krita Artists Forum
• Let's Encrypt Community
• LLVM Discussion Forums
• Logseq Community
• Lubuntu Community
• Matplotlib
• MetaBrainz
• MongoDB Community
• Mozilla
• NixOS Discourse
• NTP Pool Community
• Nvidia forums
• OpenAI Community
• Plone Community
• Ruby-Forum
• R Open Science
• R Studio Community
• Roblox Devforum
• Scammer Info
• Schizophrenia.com
• Question/answer (in Turkish: Soru cevap)
• Sublime Text Forum
• Swift Forums
• TidBITS Talks
• Tor Project Forum
• The Straight Dope Message Board
• Travis CI
• Ubuntu Budgie Discourse
• Ubuntu MATE Community
• Udacity Discussion Board
• Unofficial Netflix Online Global Search Forum
• Obsidian Forum
• OpenCV Forum
• openresearch.ai (in Korean)
• PadhAI Community / Onefourth Labs
• Papara Topluluğu (in Turkish)
• Postcrossing Community
• PyTorch
• PyMC Discourse
• Qubes OS
• Revolut Community
• The Rust Programming Language Forum
• Spiceworks Forum
• Vibrant Virginia (registration required to view)
• Watch2Gether
• Webflow
• Western Digital Community
• Wick Editor Forums
• Write Free Software
• Yii Framework
• YTP Mania
• YunoHost Forum
• Zoom Developer Forum
• Aux Community
• Pretendo Network
• Look Mum No Computer
• balena

Known Victims

• CORD-19 Dataset
  • FAQ moved to https://github.com/allenai/cord19

• Imgur Community Forums

• Feneas Forums

• New World and Lost Ark forums

• Club MyCE

Uncategorized List of Found Discourse Forums

See: Discourse/uncategorized

List of Archived Discourse Forums

• https://forums.lutris.net/ (job:4o7vdqv90h12j330b1gc8twy3, started 2024-07-14)
• https://zola.discourse.group/ (job:6xwdaxx3np2g9evco7xhs8xon, started 2024-07-15)
• https://forums.swift.org/ (job:3ubze94wi4p0k9uktkrm9z3e0, started 2024-08-10)
• https://forum.hackteria.org/ (job:1cpxoqj1n62r12sybrwiexgcg, started 2024-09-15)

References

• https://www.discourse.org
• https://github.com/discourse/discourse