What is Songfish Discourse?
Songfish Discourse (a/k/a/ SFD) is a forum for users of Songfish, moderated by admins of their respective Songfish sites.
Why do I need this/want this?
Sometimes, Songfish users want to host a forum for user discussion. For several reasons, Songfish will never have a native discussion forum. Some of the reasons include:
- The complexity of building such a tool would be very high
- The tools to effectively maintain a forum are numerous and potentially complicated
- Each users' needs in a forum are different
- Administrative burden can be significant
- Copyrights for embedded resources and imagery can be tricky
- There are already tools that do this very well
Nevertheless, periodically, the desire exists to have an integrated forum, because the community often needs or demands it. The best tool, in our opinion, for this job is an open-source software program called Discourse. Discourse is incredibly powerful, but also complex and difficult to install. If you visit the Discourse site, you'll see that it costs $50/month for a "basic" Discourse site.
While Discourse is complicated to install and build out, it's not complicated to use. In fact, most users need no training to use the software, and most administrators are able to be effective admins with only a few minutes of exploration.
We think we can do better, and ensure that Songfish users that want a forum have the best possible user experience. SFD is a full Discourse installation, without the limits that exist in standard hosted Discourse sites. For example, the Basic Discourse tier only allows 100 users, the Standard tier only permits 5 admins, etc. SFD doesn't have artificial limits - you can keep going until you run out of disk space and/or server resources, and even those can be adjusted if needed.
How much is Songfish Discourse?
SFD is an annual subscription*, separate from your Songfish subscription. There are three tiers of pricing - Basic, Premium, and High Performance. All three tiers host the exact same version of Discourse with the exact same features, and are only priced differently based on resources allocated to your dedicated forum.
Basic |
Premium |
High Performance |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup Fee | $129 one-time | $99 one-time | $99 one-time |
| Cost | $399/year | $499/year | $599/year |
| Songfish SSO | |||
| CPU | 1 vCPU | 1 AMD vCPU | 2 AMD vCPU |
| RAM/Memory | 2 GB | 2 GB | 2 GB |
| Disk | Basic SSD | AMD NVMe SSD | AMD NVMe SSD |
| Disk space | 50 GB | 50 GB | 60 GB |
| Transfer | 2 TB | 2 TB | 3 TB |
| Backups |
All SFD servers will get a free x.songfishapp.com subdomain, or you can use x.yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is an existing Songfish site. All SFD packages will enable SSO on your Songfish site, even if your site is not running Songfish Platinum.
Want something even bigger? Get in touch!
* your annual fee for Songfish Discourse covers systems administration, hosting, backups, and basic support for an installation of Discourse. Neither Songfish, songishapp.com, nor JPScheinberg LLC is charging you for use of the open-source Discourse software.