So, Pioreactor and OpenFlexure both use discourse, but is it overkill for us?
Their hosting starts at $50/month but they are Open Source, however their recommended self host is with Digital Ocean, whose carbon credentials I’m a little concerned by. On the other hand, experience dictates that going straight to GCP can be a time sink. Gerrit suggested FreeFlarum, so here we are…
So it turns out Flarum is open source as well! This install feels very snappy, and I noticed it looks good on mobile as well. Given that you were able to set up this forum in only a couple of hours using a free community-supported hosting service sounds like a win!
[[2],[2,6]]
I like trying out new self-hosted open source solutions so thanks for setting this up and looking forward to interacting more
### Notifications
Thanks @"Gerrit"#4 for setting up FoF Follow Tags so I can now get an email for each new discussion. [Gerrit also mentioned](https://forum.amybo.org/d/23-measuring-ph-with-photons/9) the
>
weekly digest/overview for Flarum is still in development,
I think that would be really useful. That way people could start off by default getting a weekly digest, which they could adjust to suit their tastes (I assume that's why I get the Pioreactor forum weekly digests).
### Kanbans / Task Management
I also put quite a lot of effort into the internal coms strategy for [GOSH](https://forum.openhardware.science)'s Open Science Shop [Open Flexure Microscope](https://openflexure.discourse.group) project, as the Open Science Shop had been using Slack which puts everything older than 90 days behind a prohibitively expensive paywall. Anyway, we're now setting up a private discourse topic there with a [Kanban](https://meta.discourse.org/t/kanban-board/118164) and hopefully [Assigns](https://www.discourse.org/plugins/assign.html?ref=blog.discourse.org).
It could be really useful for us to have a Kanban too, [but as far as I can see](https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31701-is-there-a-way-to-use-flarum-as-task-management-in-a-company) this isn't available for Flarum. If we were to do Assigns with a discourse hosted plan it would require the $300/month business (hopefully $150 when we become a charity) plan. That strikes me as not the best use of $1.8k in our first year, so perhaps we should look at self-hosting?
We could of course produce a [Kanban in Github Issues](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-create-board-github-issues/) but people seem to prefer contributing in our forum than in Github.
### Adding Links
@"Gerrit"#4 has found a good workaround for all my other issues. The main thing that still annoys me is that in Discourse (and most other apps and web apps I find myself adding links in) Ctrl-k adds a link (⌘k on Mac). I hit ⌘k probably twice each post I write in Flarum before remembering I need to go to the menu bar and click the link icon instead. I've [asked at Flarum](https://discuss.flarum.org/d/29773-keyboard-shortcuts/14).
Teaching an old dog new tricks is particularly hard when the new tricks are less efficient...
[“Amybo forum”,“AMYBO forum”]
@Martin First time I’ve heard of trying to use Kanban in a forum - interesting. Why would you want to do that if I may ask?
Talking about GitHub - I've been wondering if we should move to a more ethical service aligned with our principles than one owned by Microsoft, and I came across [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/). It looks great, and seems to have most of the features of GitHub, including [Kanban boards](https://codeberg.org/knut/examples/projects/2).
Not sure how much effort it would be to move the main Amybo website over to Codeberg if we do decide to go that route.
@“Gerrit”#p140 Why include a Kanban in a forum? Well it gives you one place to do everything & many of the tasks in a hardware development project involve discussion, which the forum is ideally set up for.
On Microsoft, I'm not a Windows fan & really hate that a number of features are missing from the non-Windows versions of Excel, etc. But I have tried and failed many times to move from Excel. I'm a little wary that it may go the same way if we try to move from GitHub. At least with spreadsheets you can try one spreadsheet elsewhere then easily revert when you find conditional formatting or vlookups don't work.
Our website is served by Netlify whom I understand would require us to be on a paid plan to use Codeberg. Hugo's a pain without something like Netlify handling continuous delivery.
It would be interesting to know if there are any people who aren't contributing because our website (not this forum or the videos) is hosted on GitHub, or who would contribute (more) if we were elsewhere. Also, conversely, are there others who would find GitHub attractive? Can you get a coding job without a well-lit GitHub profile? Or might a less conventional platform be a barrier to entry?
@RobJ had suggested Zenodo as a place we could host our results. That's another conversation it would be great to have (I guess in another thread).
@“Martin”#p150 Looks like if you run Hugo locally you can use Codeburg to sync the directory and host the static content Is it possible to use Hugo in Codeberg Page repositories? - #2 by frjo - support - HUGO
Is part of the pain running Hugo locally?
@“danwchan”#p151 Basically, with our current setup, anyone authorised can make changes in markdown in their local git repo and as soon as they sync to GitHub Netlify then has Hugo build the code to the public folder which Netlify then serves via its CDN.
@“Martin”#p152 Ah I see. If we want to use the edits from contributions via Codeburg then some sort of script would need to pull down those edits recompile via Hugo, test, and then push to a repo that hosts the static pages. With the GitHub Netify combo we only need the one repo and all the building and testing is taken care of by Netify. Am I getting that right?
@“danwchan”#p153 I guess that’s one way of doing it. I think Netlify uses Webhooks, so there may be a way to do it all with Codeburg in one repo.
I'm uncertain of the benefits Codeburg would bring.
So, does anyone (@“Trusted”#g6 & visitors) have any objections to our moving this forum across to Discourse?
OK, we’ve moved. I have now set up https://flarum.amybo.org should you wish to compare what we have here with what we had there.
I added this announcement in the old freeFlarum forum.
A huge thanks to @gerrit for setting up and hosting our new forum.
Discourse has so many settings that if there’s anything here you don’t like, or anything you miss from our old FreeFlarum forum do let us know and we’ll see if we can’t fix it.