You might have noticed that Discourse was in read-only mode for a day. This was due to a misconfiguration and has been fixed now. It shouldn’t happen again.
Cheers,
z
Is the infrastructure and configuration in a repo somewhere? I noticed you’ve used terraform in the past such as at https://github.com/nix-community/nixcon-infra
Haven’t messed around with discourse much, but I have an interest in it for another project involving Wikimedia (https://discourse.wmflabs.org/t/mailing-list-mode-and-syncing-with-mailing-lists/185/11).
Discourse is hosting this instance for free.
I don’t have access to the underlying infrastructure because it’s hosted by the discourse organization. But yeah, I am slowly moving things to terraform so everyone can submit changes to the things I control.
Nixpkgs is also missing a derivation for discourse. Discourse is a bit like gitlab in the sense that it’s a big ball of code that is hard to untangle and package properly. Your best bet is to use the docker containers for now.
Cool. Sounds like the configuration is more GUI based right now. 
Yeah, most of the config is done through the admin and is fairly straight-forward. I don’t have access to email, TLS and generally the HTTP stack. I can’t install new plugins or change any of the code that’s running.