The idea of the hosted Cloud Discourse was born with the need of providing a common Discourse for testing APIs and Webhooks for the whole team. 

Our team had already completed Milestone 0 for project readiness. This included setting up the environment - primary development IDE, secondary systems of Discourse and GChat Spaces. 

One of the challenges that we faced was the database had references to posts on local versions of Discourse. This led to discussion on better solutions. 

Team 19 started with their cloud version. Apart from the benefits of convenience, reliability and always on access, there were other advantages too. 

We decided to create another instance of Discourse for the 2024T1 SE students. This would allow students to test drive the APIs and webhooks and also enjoy the same benefits that we did.

The cloud Discourse is hosted at https://2024t1.cs3001.site and SE students can register as users. For SE project, you will need Admin access to create and manage APIs, webhooks, categories and create additional users. If you need admin access, please send a message to our Team 19 scrum master at 21f1004363@ds.study.iitm.ac.in.