Hi i’m trying to build a Discourse forum for my squadron!
I’m curious what are the spec of mudspike host?
what plugins are you using for mudspike?
ty for the help and keep up the good work!
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You mean- Discord?
Nevermind, I got it. I leave my silly answer because I must learn to think before writing.
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You mean Discorsi?
There is a good book by this guy Niccolo…
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Hi Jimmi! Our glorious forum overlord @fearlessfrog will be able to help you, if he doesn’t see this thread you ought to send him a direct message in a few days 
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What do you mean?
The glorious forum overlord sees everything…
Isn’t he the guy that directed Taxi Driver and Gooodfellas?
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I’ll have to let @fearlessfrog reply with the technical details on what the hardware is.
In simple terms, we run Discourse forum software that is tweaked and poked on by @fearlessfrog to run really nicely. Amazon AWS provides for backup storage, Digital Ocean and GoDaddy have some part of the backbone of the site, and there are a couple other odds and ends.
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Apologies for lateness in reply.
Discourse as the base forum software has been nice, but it does require some working knowledge of Linux and Docker etc. @EAF51_Jimmi if you aren’t familiar with those things already then I would not recommend you self-host, as there has often been cases where I’ve needed to do some quite low level things. If you are comfortable with ssh, bash and git etc already then you should be ok, but otherwise it opens up a lot of questions that can be tough to get through and will be very time consuming.
Discourse is based on open source software, but they also provide a hosting service for people where you don’t need technical knowledge. Details of that here:
https://payments.discourse.org/pricing
Any changes or additions I have made to Discourse you see here I’ve roll back into the main Discourse source code here:
GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
We do have a couple of plug-ins, but most of them have ended up in the above repository over time, otherwise they’ll be small things at https://github.com/fearlessfrog.
If you do have some coding and Linux experience and still want to self-host then the basic Mudspike Forums Colophon is:
Digital Ocean 4GB vCPU2 to host the Docker containers, with storage on AWS S3 using AWS Cloudfront as the CDN. CloudFlare is used as a WAF, Mailchimp for the newsletter and SendGrid as the SMTP provider. AWS Glacier for backups. The Docker containers use a Ruby/Rails, Postgres and Redis set of images.
It should be worth pointing out that our hardware is pretty much maxed out, in that we have too much traffic for it (leading to slow page loading sometimes) and have recently crossed about 9 million page views on the forum alone (since May 2015). It also takes a fair bit of my time to manage, something I am increasingly struggling with.
If the Discourse hosting plan cost is too expensive and the self-host not viable then personally I would recommend just using something like a private sub-Reddit, i.e.
https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/create
If you create one of those and set it to ‘private’ or ‘restricted’ then you can change the look and feel using CSS and easily get a squadron level forum with free hosting for topics and images/videos. You also then get to decide who can join etc. When Mudspike Forums goes visits the farm up-state one day, then that’s probably where we’re end up as well.
Hope that helped. Feel free to send me a PM for questions etc.
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Wow…Mudspike has come a long way from when it was hosted on a Commodore 64 in @fearlessfrog’s garage.
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Yup! Niccolo von Clausewitz or something like that
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OK…now I remember…wrote a book called “On War”…not nearly as funny as it is in the original German…most should probably wait until the movie comes out.
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I got that reference!
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@fearlessfrog You scared me as hell here!
I’m not an IT guy but so far i managed to open the DO droplet, ssh it, set up mailgun as mail server and set up the forum (need to set up backups and wonder how much time will be needed to fill those 50gb)
and to install some plugins (now i want to try your random aircraft 
)
but i’m not a linux guy or a coder so i’m worried in fixing problems if something goes wrong!
Right now our forum is on Vbullettin
http://forum.europeanaf.net/forum.php
it served well for almost 20 years (EAF was born in 1998) but lately Whatsapp and other social media got some part of our comms and we got too much self-referntial and closed group! I would like something modern and super mobile friendly to get back life to the forum.
Mudspike forums and its top notch community has been an inspiration!
Obviously you are all invited to fly WWII planes with us on DCS or BoX or Clod!
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Can you transfer the old threads/posts to the new forum?
If not, Are you going to make the old EAF forums “read only” or just close them?
Wheels
Well right now we are just testing the new one! (Old forum handler doesn’t like the new one!)
But if we like how it works i would like to try the import script! (So far I haven’t found an easy guide on how to do it with my skill level🤨)
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