Someone reached out to me on meta.discourse.org to ask some questions about Discourse for their interaction design studies. I answered in private, but this is good info, and a subject I’d like to go explore.
Hi. Hope your studies go well.
I use Discourse for:
- personal club
- city community resource
- personal email management
- collaborative work
- gaming groups
- public group/discovery
While there is obvious overlap, those are six distinct sites I currently operate for myself.
I consider Discourse a web-based message queue service. Plugins, permissions, and notification levels/routes provide a toolbox to create human-centric workflows. That sounds very technical (I’m a consulting technologist), but what I mean is whereas other frameworks create solutions for developers to deploy solutions, the guiding principles of the project mean they study human interaction and build systems to accommodate.
I like using Discourse as a knowledge navigator, similar to how Mediawiki is used; in lieu of smarter “user-agents” (web browsers), we have these web apps out there tracking notifications and moving around data (I particularly love the Discourse file caching system, used to prevent broken file links, but also providing a better and less invasive experience.
Let me know if you have any more questions. Good luck. 