While I have plenty of experience in communities and mailing lists, this is my first time running Discourse. So, if you see anything that is wrong, or can be improved or added, come tell me! I want to hear it 
Is there a way to add a link to the actual website in the footer or header of Discourse in case some comes to the forum from google and does not realise the obvious domain/subdomain pattern?
Also, is google allowed to index the forum?
I’m sure that’s doable, I’ll look into it
At the moment no, as the whole forum is private. What’s our preference here? Options:
1 Signups allowed but community is private unless logged in
2 Signups allowed, anonymous browsing allowed, no indexing
3 Signups allowed, anonymous browsing allowed, indexing allowed
I’m inclined to go for (3) unless there are concerns…
3 unless you believe indexing may add considerable CPU load.
I doubt it. It’s done, signups are live
Done. It’s top right, next to the user profile, but it uses the exact same icon as top-left, so not ideal. If you have an idea of how to make that more obvious, let me know.
It’s done via custom CSS and custom Header, in the Admin panel. I suck at CSS so code is shamelessly stolen from Customize the header with links, icons, or menus - #42 - admins - Discourse Meta and can probably be tweaked better.
I played a bit but ended up simply adding home icon from font-awesome titled “Back to main site” which only appears on hover.
That should be enough.
I noticed that visiting:
http://www.community.hestiapi.com/
throws a 403. Is that something I should fix from the subdomain settings or an .htaccess settings?
i wouldn’t link to www.community if I were you, I’d just use community everywhere. If you really must, make it a CNAME to community but be aware the SSL cert doesn’t cover www.community
Ι wouldn’t link to www.community but just in case someone got it memorised and tried typing it directly by hand… Very rare scenario. No worries.