I went looking and seaching, and didn't find a Free Discourse Forums host so far.
Best I found was a professional install and config, done for you, costing $150 USD one time fee. This is installed into a Digital Ocean droplet small server, which is a $5 a month service fee.
Screenshot from : https://www.literatecomputing.com/discourse-installation-packages/
Discourse.org also says you can do it yourself -- and provides this page to guide :
https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/
A Digital Ocean signup with a FREE one month of service deal -- https://m.do.co/c/a5bf212d9a92
Although staying here and using the already running service is the simplest option of all.
🇳🇱
The official discourse support channels are a joke. I highly recommend you stay away from it. Its open source software so I cant really be too mean on them, but they are some oily business people on that forum in my expiernce.
They intentionally design the installation docs to be very narrow and rigid so if anyone wants to install discourse in a cheaper or more professional setup they have to pay one of them a fortune to do it.
I was stuck redoing a lot of discourse to get it work in docker and with no help from them. To even ask for help would have gotten me banned (I was warned when I tried).
@freemo @design_RG @globcoco I think this is part the issue with quite a few free software products / projects, they are good at writing software but when it comes to help and support some fail and fail badly.
I think it was also agreed they fail when it comes to documentation too.
The bigger issue for me is that the failure is explicitly states as intentional.
@design_RG @freemo @globcoco I know writeAs charge quite a bit to install the software for you if you are unable to do it yourself. .
@freemo @zleap @globcoco
The Discourse people are being clearly greedy -- and making hundreds of thousands a month from the companies paying their fees.
That in itself is not the problem, it's fair if they get an income stream to support their running costs and previous development lean years.
But to actively obscure any simpler ways to use the open sourced product they offer? That is the bad point.
The Write.as company also seems to have had some tugs with open source people in the past; I didn't read much about it, but I know Ellen mentioned it and wasn't impressed.
Plume is an alternative to WF, but I don't like it as much. Uglier and with less features I need and use.