The discourse server backend is EXTREMELY heavy, essentially requiring a dedicated server or beefy VPS to host.
I've seriously scratched my head trying to fathom why devuan distro (and Manjaro?) have embraced such a platform.
On less than "beefy" hardware, or if a visitor is using a resource-limited PC, the javascript-laden pageloads can really be intolerably slow.
The only valid motivator for choosing discourse (my opinion) is that is does/can "scale", can accommodate serving thousands of simultaneous logged in users.
So, unless a forum site is already well-established or can REASONABLY be expected to have thousands of daily active user in the foreseeable future, I believe it's the incorrect tool for the job.
btw, user dissatisfaction with slow performance of the nascent forum of the devuan distro (discourse-based) has, in fact, bred a spin-off forumsite called "dev1galaxy.org"
