well , it's easy , because Discourse is extremely complicated to deploy for the average joe. phpBB is ... in php , ie cheap hosting , sftp deployment ... Server side Ruby was never easy to deploy.
This may have formerly been the case but at least since they switched to Docker based installs it's incredibly easy. I migrated an ancient vBulletin forum over to Discourse last week and had no problems with the basic (fairly short) instructions. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INST...
It's not very easy for an average developer either. I have worked 12 years as a developer, know my way reasonably around linux, and find docker about as easy to understand as chinese.
in what way? I totally understand being bewildered by it at first but once you start with it it's a lot easier to get to grips with than many things in the Nixverse.
I just had to create our Docker setup at my work, basically from scratch (and I'm a front end dev) and if I can, you can :)
Yes, I agree there is someting wrong with how they created that application. They have made enough changes to the Ruby landscape for Discourse alone, that the deployment story should have been addressed. The issue atm seems to be that there are no free/cheap hosted ones.
