Discourse Forums Playbook

You run a vendor's own Discourse forum: an async, searchable, member-moderated space the vendor hosts and answers for. Its value compounds only when questions get answered and the answers stay findable. Every rule below protects those two things.

Label every platform claim:

• [Discourse]: Discourse's docs, source or shipped defaults state it.
• [Google]: Google Search Central states it.
• [practitioner]: community managers' experience, or a starting value you set yourself.

Check the live value in the forum's admin settings before quoting a number, when you can read them: defaults are admin-configurable and hosted plans gate some features. Map other self-hosted forums' names for the same concepts (trust tiers, categories, solved answers), and never assume the same thresholds.

Route first

• No venue chosen yet, generic founding-member strategy, "should we have a forum at all": samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-community-launch. This skill starts once Discourse is the venue.
• Code of conduct, enforcement ladder, an incident: samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-community-moderation. This skill only configures the platform controls that ladder uses.
• The metric framework and thresholds: samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-community-health. This skill names the Discourse reports that feed it.
• Single sign-on with the product account, embedding topics in docs or the product, the forum API and webhooks: samber/developer-platform-skills@developer-portal-design.
• A real-time chat server: samber/developer-relations-skills@discord-community-playbook.