Discourse administration advice please

Software & Web Applications
1

I have successfully installed discourse using the docker method. I am using Amazon SES for my mail server, and have it exposed through a Cloudflare tunnel to the world. Internally, I put it in its own VM, rather than commingling it with my other docker containers (e.g., Nextcloud, Joplin, Home Assistant, etc.), mainly because if I messed up the install, I didn’t want to take down those other services. Everything is working great. My questions are more on the ongoing administration of Discourse:

  1. What are the recommended plugins? Are there any that are essential to security or spam mitigation?
  2. Tom, I saw in one of your videos you spoke about back ups. Could you go into a little more detail there? I am wondering if it makes sense to bind mount an NFS share from my TrueNAS machine so that I don’t run out of room on my qemu virtual disk. Thoughts?
  3. In the long run am I better off running this in its own VM? Or should I try to integrate Discourse into the VM running all my other docker containers?
  4. Any other admin insights anyone can share? I don’t know what I don’t know about running a forum. The purpose of this forum, when it finally goes into production, is to support the community around my wife’s food blog web site. My Mrs. will be moderating the forum. I am just the tech guy on this one.
2
  1. I only have the Ad Plugin that we use to show a few things from our swag store.
  2. Currently these forums run on a Linode instance and I am using both Linodes backup and the build in Discourse backup to create a file automatically
  3. I keep it as a dedicated instance
  4. The value of forums is keeping them well moderated and on topic so they are valuable ot the people looking for things.
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