Hey, just came across Linen. I'm an entrepreneur in the newsletter space. I've wanted something like a mix between Discourse and Discord/Slack for a while--easy to set up and good for informal discussion like Discord/Slack, but also public and good at async discussion like Discourse. I have a small Discord community for my own newsletter; their newish forum channels feature actually makes it pretty good. Though it's annoying that I can't put links to forum topics in my newsletter without my subscribers who haven't yet joined the discord server getting hit with a discord signin form. I actually made a proof-of-concept bot for publishing discord servers to a public site: https://discord.tfos.co/. I'm really glad to see you're working on this as a business! Couple of suggestions/thoughts: - Would it be a possibility to host a Discord bot instance instead of making people create their own? That's what I do for my proof-of-concept; adding it to your Discord server is dead easy. Not a huge priority for me I guess since I've already made the bot for Linen, but I found the process quite tedious and I'm guessing hosting a bot would improve your conversion rates significantly. At least this does mean you don't need to get authorized by Discord, which I suppose may or may not be a problem... - I'd love to be able to put in my Discord invite link somewhere and then have that be displayed on the public page. So I can link to a forum topic in the newsletter, then someone can follow the link and see the discussion, and then they can join the server from that page if they want to write a comment. I think this would be the only thing I'd need in order to start using Linen at least a little bit. - Ultimately I'd prefer to migrate away from Discord and just use Linen when it's mature enough, assuming that's a use-case you're interested in supporting/focusing on. - There might be some useful things that could be done for newsletters... e.g. perhaps when someone signs up for my newsletter, they can choose to also join the community. If they do, then their email gets added to Linen, and they get weekly digest emails, like the ones Discourse sends. Or something like that.

Hey Jacob welcome and thanks for the feedback! I've also moved this to feedback channel btw. You can put the discord link in the settings page under configuration and community invitation url and your join the community button should show up as a link to Discord. We do plan on adding some sort of newsletter digest later. Our end goal is to become a place for people to host public communities with both the benefits of a forum and real time chat. Would love to hear a bit more about what features you would like us to prioritize.

Our end goal is to become a place for people to host public communities with both the benefits of a forum and real time chat. Would love to hear a bit more about what features you would like us to prioritize.

Excellent--that's exactly what I've been wanting. I'll try to set aside some time soon to play around with Linen some more and come up with some more detailed feedback.

You can put the discord link in the settings page under configuration and community invitation url and your join the community button should show up as a link to Discord.

Oh, I should've looked around a bit first! Thank you.