I’ve created a forum for discussing all things nerdy, the BrettTerpstra.com Forum. I wanted a place to have conversations about my various projects, but also to allow more interaction with my readers. I’ll be active on it, and I hope you will too.
Right now every one of my projects has different discussion forums, mostly hosted on GitHub, but they’re separated by project and there’s no unified place for support, questions, feature requests, and actual interaction. This is my attempt to consolidate and also increase interaction with the community.
I’m nervous about launching this because I fear nobody will talk and I’ll feel unpopular, but I won’t know until I try. I know, one more place to be active online, one more source of notifications, yet another place to chat. I know we all have too many of these. I chose this format over a Discord server or other synchronous communication because I like that it’s _a_synchronous. You can show up when you feel like it, and just get email notifications about responses to your conversations, waiting until you have the time to add to the discussion.
The forum is at forum.brettterpstra.com. Here’s a special invite link that will get you in and give you immediate access to introduce yourself and join/start a conversation.
I set this up using the Discourse droplet on DigitalOcean, which is a very affordable way to host cloud applications, if you’re ever interested in building your own. I’m also using a free account at Mailgun to handle notification emails and such.
I’ve switched the comments on this blog over to using the forum as an embed. Each blog post will create a new topic on the forum, and you’ll be able to discuss and add comments via Discourse. It will require login (you can log in with GitHub or email), but should offer a saner way to handle comments on my posts. Give it a shot on this one and let me know what you think! In the process I’ve lost all comment history, but it is what it is.
I sincerely hope you’ll join, participate, and make a community out of my readership. Don’t be shy. I have 20,000 site viewers, 35,000 RSS subscribers, 13,000 Twitter followers, 2500 Mastodon followers, 9000 GitHub stars, and yet I still have a hard time getting interaction… I’d love to hear from you!
