Hey everyone! Curious on everyone’s experience using Discourse and how it compares to the previous Vercel Discord, either from the Vercel team (building and moderating this forum) or active community members (participating in threads and asking questions).
I personally thought Discourse felt a little outdated from a UI/UX perspective, but definitely know there are a ton of pros like open-source software, self-hostable, battle-tested code, customizability, etc
Hi, @connorjchen! Welcome to the Vercel Community. It’s great to have you join us. 
For us, it’s been working quite well and is fantastic from a community moderation perspective. In the past we were mostly on GitHub Discussions which lacked this specifically. I’d also let @amyegan share her thoughts as the one that got this platform set up
AFAIK, we only have a Next.js Discord, run by the community. We’ve never had a Vercel Discord. Although you mentioned Discord, I feel the need to share this recent discussion:
Have you got any feedback on what we’ve built here? 
We’ve done our best to make this as Vercel as possible with the style, but open to feedback. Do you have any improvement points?
In case it’s helpful, I shared a talk back in the summer about our community platform:
If you have any other specific questions, we’d be happy to go into it!
Hey Pauline! Thanks so much for the in-depth response. I watched both of these videos end-to-end. The first video you sent was actually a frickin’ goldmine of information that I was seeking to find!! For context, I’m not that familiar with the community platform space, but I’m a dev and when I saw Railway’s, it clicked for me. I then proceeded to build a platform (using Vercel of course) similar to Railway (https://trypaladin.com) to serve other companies and through that process found out about all the things you guys talked about (Discord, Railway, Discourse, AnswerOverflow). Literally spot on!!! This video would have saved me a month of information gathering!!
Regarding the Discourse UI/UX I mentioned, I was mainly referencing all other Discourses I’ve seen. Vercel has actually done a great job (as usual) customizing the look and feel of it. This must have taken a lot of effort!! Well done @amyegan. Do you guys self host this community yourselves?
In the video, you mentioned tweeting a list of the ideal community features you’d want. However, I wasn’t able to find that tweet. Would you be able to link it? Very interested in your opinions given your extensive community experience. Furthermore, would love to get your feedback on my platform as I continue building it out in order to make it a platform that is actually something community developers / companies / users want.
Hi @pawlean or @amyegan , also curious, were any solutions other than Discourse/Discord considered? Feels like there are no other comparable/good alternatives in this space haha
We considered a lot of different options (basically the same lists you’ll find if you search up “community platforms”). Most of them couldn’t be customized as much as we wanted or just didn’t offer some of the other features we needed to support this community. None of them are perfect, but Discourse suited our needs best when we were deciding on a platform