How did Monzo create their community forum

Monzo Chat
21

Does discourse do the ranking system thing or did that have to be added as a special feature?

22

If you put neon yellow or red on black I wouldn’t even try to attempt reading anything. One of my lecturers used to do red text on black PowerPoints and I’m blaming her for needing stronger glasses after that year.

23

Standard feature https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924

Although I think it can be adjusted to fit requirements

24

FWIW, Discourse is open source like WordPress, and similarly offers either hosted or self-hosted options. I set up a forum very easily on Digital Ocean. I looked at the ‘official’ hosted solution but it was much more expensive. It’s fairly easy to set up, though getting the outbound emails to work properly is a bit of a rigmarole.

1 Like
25

I see Amaiz are also using Discourse for their new community.

27

Thanks. Is it easy to use once installed and is there any customisation options?

28

The admin on the front end is really easy, and there are lots of ways you can customise it - though, like WordPress, it’s always obvious you’re using that software. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing - people who visit the forum will know how to operate it.

Customisation is a little tricky, not impossible, but it’s not quite a case of clicking on options panels.

If you go to the ‘official’ hosting, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial, and just cancel at the end. I don’t think they ask for a card to sign up with from what I recall, but I know they didn’t even try to bill me. You’ll be able to test it and see how easy things are.

2 Likes
29

is discourse good for in-house messaging, or communicating with other team mates?

30

I’d probably use slack for that

3 Likes
31

I’m not a fan. Constantly paranoid I’m posting publicly on the forum instead of sending a message. Rarely use it

3 Likes
32

You can have forums restricted to specific user groups, but as @TonyHoyle says, Slack is much better for that kind of thing. You could get an integration so that public posts on the forum are posted by a bot on Slack, so you wouldn’t miss anything you needed to reply to.

1 Like
33

Does Discourse come with any analytics to measure how effective it is or how happy the community is, or anything like that.

34

Sure! I look at all kinds of analytics every day - weekly/monthly active users, new users
 things like that!

I don’t have an exact way to measure “how happy the community is” but taking on board how many people are active (are folks joining or leaving?) and anecdotal feedback gives me a pretty good idea :slight_smile:

1 Like
35

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.