Discourse Forum on PIXLS.US

After a bunch of hard work by someone not me (darix), there’s finally a neat solution for commenting on PIXLS.US. An awesome side effect is that we get a great forum along with it.

Discourse

On the advice from the same guy that convinced me to build PIXLS using a static site generator (see above), I ended up looking into, and finally going with, a Discourse forum.

The actual forum location will be at: discuss.pixls.us

What is extra neat about the way this forum works, though, is the embedding. For every post on the pixls.us blog (or an article), the forum will pickup on the post and will automatically create topics on the forum that coincide with the posts. Some small embedding code on the website allows these topic replies to show up at the end of a post similar to comments.

For instance, see the end of this blog post to see the embedding in action!

Come on by!

I personally really like this new forum software, both for the easy embedding, but also the fact that we own the data ourselves and are not having to farm it out through a third party service. I have enabled third party oauth logins if anyone is ok with using them (but are not required to - normal registration with email through us is fine of course).

I like the idea of being able to lower the barrier to participating in a community/forum, and the ability to auth against google or twitter for creating an account significantly lowers that friction I think.

Some Thanks are in Order

It’s important to me to point out that being able to host PIXLS.US and now the forum is entirely due to the generosity of folks visiting my blog here. All those cool froods that take a minute to click an ad help offset the server costs, and the ridiculously generous folks that donate money (you know who you are) are amazing.

As such, their generosity means I can afford to bootstrap the site and forums for a little while (without having to dip into the wife goodwill fund…).

What does this mean to the average user? Thanks to the folks that follow ads here or donate, PIXLS.US and the forum is ad-free. Woohoo!