discourse-manager: A Community Management Sim Inside Discourse

There's a browser game called You are the OS where you play as a computer's operating system. Processes request memory, users get impatient, the machine dies if you can't keep up. It's a sim about a thing most people interact with every day but never think about.

I wanted to make that, but for community moderation.

The result is discourse-manager, a Discourse plugin that turns your forum into the game. You play as the moderator. Fake users, fake posts, and fake drama are generated inside your actual Discourse instance and rendered with real Discourse components. The flag queue looks like the real flag queue. The user cards look like real user cards. The avatars, the trust level badges, the category labels - all real.

The whole joke is that it runs inside Discourse itself.

The game

You manage four meters: community health, mod response time, spam rate, and user retention. Let any of them hit zero and the community collapses.

Flags come in continuously. Each one is a decision:

• Approve - the post stands, move on
• Remove - gone
• Warn - the user gets a PM, post stays
• Suspend - off the forum for a while
• Ban - gone for good, but take retention damage if you're wrong

Speed matters. A flag that sits unresolved too long costs health. Clearing them fast restores response time. The tension is between acting fast and acting correctly.

On top of the queue, random events fire. Each has two or three resolution options with different tradeoffs across the meters.

Community events: a spicy topic goes viral and generates 30 flags in 60 seconds, a wave of sockpuppets registers, two trusted users start fighting in a thread, a great newcomer shows up worth recognizing.

Technical incidents too: a plugin update ships and breaks something, the server goes down and users are posting about it on Twitter, a database migration fails in production, a CDN failure makes images disappear sitewide, a cleanup script runs with the wrong scope and takes out several categories. Each incident hits different meters - an outage tanks response time and health, a CDN failure hammers retention. The resolutions have real tradeoffs: push a hotfix live and risk making it worse, or roll back and eat the downtime.

Each day has a timer. When it ends you get a summary - flags resolved, bans issued, incidents handled - before starting the next one. Survive 30 days to win.

The fake community

The forum is populated at game start with 40 generated users across five behavioral profiles: lurkers, contributors, trolls, spammers, and newbies. Each profile generates realistic-looking posts and a realistic probability of getting flagged.

The posts are the best part. A troll posts "anyone who disagrees with me is just wrong, full stop." A spammer posts "I make $4000/week working from home. DM me for details." A newbie asks "HOW DO I CHANGE MY USERNAME?? I've been trying for 20 minutes!!" A contributor posts something thoughtful about why the community has been so toxic lately.

None of it is real. All of it feels real. That's the thing Discourse's design language does so well - the UI is so recognizable that fake content in it reads as plausible immediately.

Occasionally a legitimate post gets flagged incorrectly. You have to read the content and make a judgment call, not just pattern-match on the flag type.

Why inside Discourse

I could have built this as a standalone web app. It would have been faster and simpler.

But the whole premise of the game is that you're moderating a forum that looks real. If I build a custom UI, it looks like a game. If I build it as a Discourse plugin, it looks like Discourse. The cognitive effect only works when you can't tell at a glance whether you're looking at a real post or a fake one.

The plugin renders with actual Discourse components: the same avatars, the same button styles, the same layout. The HUD - four meters with green/yellow/red color coding - sits above the review queue the way a real dashboard might. Events pop in as styled cards. It all fits the host environment.

Building inside Discourse also gave me MessageBus for free. Real-time state updates from the server to the client - flags disappearing as you clear them, meters ticking down - all through the same pub/sub system Discourse uses for live notifications. No WebSocket setup. No extra infrastructure.

What's next

The one thing I still want to add: LLM-generated content. Right now the post pool is handwritten strings - good enough to feel real, but every playthrough is the same drama. Running an LLM at game init to generate a full set of forum posts tuned to the behavioral profiles would make each run different. The structure is already there; it just needs something to fill it with varied text.

The most interesting idea that came up while building it: this could double as a spam detection training tool. Every flagged post has a profile type and a human moderation decision attached. Play enough sessions and you have a labeled dataset of spam, trolling, and legitimate posts. The game generates it as a side effect.

The code

It's a Discourse plugin, so the setup is what you'd expect:

cd /var/www/discourse/plugins
git clone https://github.com/ducks/discourse-manager
bundle exec rake db:migrate

Then go to /play.

Source at github.com/ducks/discourse-manager.