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Comment by muratsu | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.

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(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas.

In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team!

And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.

It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.

yep - on the grounds we have lots of competition so we need to stand out! And hey, front page HN for doing weird stuff… :)

Discourse can do that…

Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.

What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?

Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.

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