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tiaa-forum.org Colophon

What is a colophon?

Some of us (who are old 😀) were always amused by the section in the O’Reilly technology books where the authors described not only the fonts, printing processes, and publishing details, but also the computers and software used to generate the books. We borrow the term here to describe the meta-information about the site and story of tiaa-forum.org.

We use the term colophon as a way to tell you something about the website you’re viewing. We do this for two reasons:

  1. To explain how tiaa-forum.org is put together — what technologies and hosting we use in support of what you see on the site.
  2. If you know better technologies or practices than you see us using here, you might be able to suggest them to us for our consideration.

The best way to talk to us about this site is to post a topic in the forum category “Forum Site Feedback.” If you’re not a member of the forum (please, sign up! 😀), you can Join Here or send email to info@tiaa-forum.org and one of our administrators will be happy to consider your suggestions.

tiaa-forum.org: History, Basic Information

At the first and second National AA Technology Workshop (NAATW) in 2014 and 2015, attendees discussed creating an online forum for collaboration between annual workshops. At the NAATW members meeting, the group voted to experiment with an online forum to hold conversations between workshops.

The group conscience of the forum and the forum administrators established that only AA members and those supporting AA services (e.g. webmasters for AA sites, intergroup/central office managers) would share in the forum.

A few attendees of the early National AA Technical Workshops looked into ways of extending conversations between annual workshops. They investigated several platform options (e.g. phpBB, Vbulletin, etc.), including both hosted services and stand-alone software.

After some discussion, the founding admins decided to implement a self-hosted version of Discourse  (further explanation of the rationale and implementation of Discourse is included in the section below).

tiaa-forum.org launched in late 2015 and became public in early 2016 (originally named naatw-forum.org — renamed tiaa-forum.org in late 2016). By the end of 2016 the forum had about 100 total members. As of 4/1/26, membership was over 3,300.

More information about our current organization is included in the Organization section below.

The Technology in use for tiaa-forum.org

The forum is comprised of a private (members only) Discourse discussion forum and a public. WordPress front end .

The Community Platform - Discourse

The team chose to build on Discourse  for several reasons:

  • Open source with a modern, responsive web interface
  • Emoji support and markdown-style editing of posts
  • Scalable to small and large communities (some Discourse communities have hundreds of thousands of members)
  • A good support community (Meta.Discourse.Org) — Discourse is developed and supported by the same team behind communities like Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow, which serve millions of members
  • Wide community support and general use across thousands of popular forums
  • Fairly simple administration

Discourse packages as a Docker container, making it straightforward to install in a self-hosted configuration and easy to keep updated (more in the Plumbing section below).

Discourse runs as a Ruby on Rails application with an Ember JavaScript framework front end that executes in the browser. This architecture means that even large forums with many active members present little additional load to the host per transaction. Discourse is a mature app serving millions of members across hundreds of forums. Consequently, it includes hundreds of Ruby gem dependencies and other components to support performance and throughput.

Our Public Presence – WordPress

The Forum admins chose WordPress as a front end because of WordPress’ impressive popularity and market share, both in general and within the A.A. community. Because admins will rotate or step away, the team felt that WordPress would provide the broadest talent pool for replacing admins when needed.

The admin team added the WordPress front end in 2018, primarily to:

  • Give potential new members an interface to request an invitation
  • Provide a “public” face to the forum:
  • Improve search engine optimization so others can find the forum more easily. The Discourse software offered no simple way to improve web visibility without risking forum security.
  • Publish technical information useful to non-members
  • A WordPress environment provides broader long-term talent support — more skilled talent exists for PHP/WordPress than for the Ruby on Rails/Ember environment of the Discourse platform.
  • Support the ability for forum members to contribute financially to forum support

In 2023, the leadership team decided to redesign the WordPress front end in an initiative called “Forum 2.0.” The goals were:

  • To put useful information in the public-facing area of the website (making it unnecessary for people to join or log in to see useful conversations) — the team called these articles “Hot Topics”
  • To improve SEO — by placing these articles publicly, tiaa-forum.org improves its Search Engine Optimization
  • To update and improve site design to be generally more modern and attractive

As of 2026, moreover, work is underway to evolve this WordPress front end with more features and better SEO.

WordPress theme

The current configuration uses Elementor Pro as the WordPress theme/page builder. The team chose the Pro version (purchased with a yearly license) to gain better support and useful features (e.g. dynamic content, animations, more powerful forms, Custom Code, etc.) for the Forum 2.0 development effort.

WordPress Plugins

The team continually evaluates plugins and welcomes suggestions based on others’ experience. The major plugins currently in use are:

  • Akismet — a common WP anti-spam filter used primarily for blocking spam in comments (turned off). May be useful for protecting against vulnerabilities going forward
  • Duplicator — creates backups and images of the WP site easily
  •  WP Mail SMTP — integrates with the mail relay/gateway (currently Amazon SES). The team previously tried ‘Easy WP SMTP’. However, its maintainers declined to support a bug fix the team provided, so the team moved on.
  • Simple History — tracks site changes so multiple administrators can share work without conflicts
  • WP-Discourse — this plugin connects WordPress to the Discourse environment which enables Discourse as the single sign-on login for the site
  • WordFence — currently running the free version. The paid version primarily addresses email issues less relevant since the Discourse managed service now handles members’ email.
  • Yoast SEO — informs how the public site appears to search engines and AI crawlers

TIAA -wPplugin

The Platform sub-team coordinated development of a bespoke plugin, tiaa-wpplugin. The team built this plugin to provide:

  • Better architecture and process for new user signups
  • Better support for the new member welcoming message process
  • Additional interfaces for admin and site support

Other Technology Details

Hosting

The team hosts the production and test WordPress sites and the test Discourse instance on DigitalOcean (DO) virtual hosts. With DO, you rent “raw iron” (equivalent to a standalone computer) from the hosting company and handle all basic system administration tasks (software installation, updates, backups, firewall management, etc.).

The initial Forum admins selected DO as a VPS provider because:

  • The team had prior experience with them
  • DO offered competitive pricing compared to similar services
  • In 2015, DO was one of the few providers guaranteeing all-SSD disk storage (significantly higher performance)
  • DO has a good reputation for support and the ability to scale
  • Reliability exceeds 99.99% uptime
  • A new VPS can spin up in minutes if needed
  • Excellent DO tutorials for setting up Discourse and WordPress VPSs

The entire site runs on a VPS configured with two processors, 8GB memory, and 120GB of storage.

Discourse Managed Service

In 2022, the team decided to move the Discourse forum (tiaa-forum.org) to a managed service. While more expensive (around $150/month in 2022), the managed service provides dependable support for operations of the software, computing, network, and storage infrastructure. The team retains administrative access to configure and manage the community according to its own needs.

Moving to the managed service also allowed the team to run identical software and configuration on the test server. As a result, development on themes and configuration changes can be tested safely with minimal — usually zero — impact on the production environment.

Backups and Snapshots

The team keeps one snapshot from each major configuration change and takes automatic weekly live backups on the production WordPress VPS. Additionally, near-equivalent VPS images (WordPress and Discourse) allow the team to spin up or spin down test environments quickly without impacting the production forum.

Plumbing - how it's all connected

When a request arrives at the virtual machine (VM) from the web, the DNS server on the Digital Ocean VM routes it based on the URL: requests for discourse.tiaa-forum.org go to the managed Discourse service, while requests for *.tiaa-forum.org go to the WordPress container or test Discourse instance.

WordPress runs on a Docker Compose container — actually two separate containers (WordPress instance and Database server) managed from a single configuration file — with an Apache server in a PHP environment.

Production Discourse runs on infrastructure managed by the Discourse team. In contrast, the test Discourse server uses a separate Docker container with an nginx server supporting a Ruby on Rails environment.

Amazon SES currently handles outbound email from the WordPress instance. The Discourse managed service team handles email from the production forum. As of late 2023, the forum peaks at over 200,000 emails per month.

Google Workspace (formerly Google G-Suite), using a Google for Non-profits account, handles inbound email services as well as some other administrative and documentation needs.

Organization

From 2015–2018, an “Admin Team” of 4–5 members managed and supported the site, meeting bi-weekly. A member’s credit card covered site expenses, supplemented by a few contributions.

The team started with the intent of running a “trial” to test whether this kind of tool served a real need for the fellowship. Beginning in late 2018 through 2019, discussions explored making tiaa-forum.org an ongoing AA service enterprise.

During 2017–2018, the leadership team considered combining a business organization with the NAATW steering committee. Both organizations decided that operating separately would allow each to be most effective. Consequently, tiaa-forum registered as a charitable nonprofit in the state of Colorado in 2019, applied for and received 501(c)(3) IRS designation, and opened bank accounts.

The organizational structure will be familiar to most AA members. Per the official bylaws, a Board meets quarterly and oversees overall policy and finances. For day-to-day operations, an Admin Team meets monthly. It comprises two sub-teams:

  • Community Management Sub-team — responsible for supporting member training, interactions, and evolution of the forum environment; also communicates the availability of the forum to the broader AA community
  • Platform Sub-team — responsible for maintaining the software and overall operations of tiaa-forum.org

As of 2026, dedicated volunteers accomplish all leadership and maintenance tasks for the forum. The board is beginning a conversation about the possibility and need for a paid special worker.

Instructions for Completing this Form

Name:

The name you use here is not verified and only used to control for spam and bot submissions. It will not be tied to your account. You can create and edit a profile disclosing the account name and information you wish to expose to the community (not publicly visible outside the forum) when and after you join.

Email:

Email where the invitation to join will be sent. This will also become a secondary way of logging in or recovering your password. We recommend a personal email address (e.g. your_name@example.com) instead of a “positional” email address (e.g. webmaster@your_intergroup.org) unless you intend for you membership to rotate with the person holding the position in the future. This email address can be changed after you join if you wish to change it by editing your profile information.

Affirmation:

By the group conscience of the members, this forum is only open to members of AA and those non-members of AA supporting AA services (e.g. Intergroup offices, AA service structure, etc.).

Topic Interests:

If you are interested in conversations in more than one  technical topic area (e.g. web sites, answering services, virtual meetings, etc.) or have a general curiosity about AA discussions in general (e.g. topics above and beyond technology like committees and group dynamics), you would probably want to select the default “General” option.

If your primary interest is in Archives only, you probably want to select the “Archives” option. Note that with either option, you will still have access to all topics on the forum but with the “Archives” option, your “home screen” will automatically place you in the “Archives” category where most of those conversations happen.