The Curious Engineer

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Discourse

blog.discourse.org

Learn about the powerful, open source community platform.

Web developmentRuby / RailsDevOps / SRE / infrastructure

’15’20’25
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259 from 5 Feb 2013 to 26 Oct 2026
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2026 40

  1. Markdown Endpoints: Your Community, in a Format That AI Agents Can Read
  2. How to Run the Best Comment Section on the Web: A Playbook for Publishers
  3. Discourse in 2027: Building Together
  4. How to Keep a Discourse Post in Sync with an X Feed
  5. Introducing Discourse Workflows
  6. How TurboRenault Moved 20,000 Members from XenForo to Discourse
  7. How to use Discourse for Customer Support
  8. AMD: Building One Developer Community
  9. Introducing the All-New Admin Dashboard
  10. Discourse Discover: Building in the Physical World
  11. Introducing the Discourse Free Plan
  12. Discourse Discover: How Top Tech Brands Run Their Communities
  13. I’m tracking down the world’s best community builders. Here’s what I’ve learned so far...
  14. How I use AI as the co-CEO of a remote company
  15. Netwrix: Removing Language Barriers Across a Global Product Community
  16. discover Discourse Discover: May Roundup This month’s Discover Roundup highlights communities where people build things in public, then turn the hard parts into shared knowledge!
  17. ai Discourse is Agent Ready: Here’s How If the agentic future is here, your Discourse community has everything it needs to be ready. If you want to opt out, the options are yours - and we have your back either way.
  18. reddit Discourse Will Never Block You From the Web Reddit is pushing mobile users out of the browser and into its app because apps give platforms more control, more data, and more ways to monetise attention. Discourse takes the opposite position.
  19. internet The Digg Lesson: Why Moderation Infrastructure Matters Digg was a platform many of us loved, and we were excited to see its return - and it’s easy to see its second downfall as the result of an Internet Gone Bad. But that implies social platforms are doomed. And at Discourse, we don’t belie
  20. multilingual What It's Actually Like to Use Discourse in Another Language The real-world experience of the AI translation feature we shipped in 2025
  21. discover Discourse Discover: Hobbyist Edition A unicycling forum with newsgroup roots, a miniature house community where builders troubleshoot each other's glue work, and a flight sim whose members run their own ATC; three forums running on the generous, specific expertise that makes Discourse speci
  22. case study Case Study: How We Gave Brand Loyalty a Community A high-end lingerie brand found in malls across America needed a new loyalty program: a tiered system offering perks and rewards for increasing customer engagement
  23. open-source Discourse is Not Going Closed Source Cal.com just closed their source code, arguing AI has made open source too dangerous. After 13 years of building Discourse in public, we're staying open. Here's why.
  24. coding How Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke ext4 Hardlinks One reaction GIF. Used constantly in posts, PMs, everywhere. Each use in a different security context creates a new copy. 246,173 copies of Rachel from Friends doing a happy dance.
  25. Building for Every Language The second post in the Discourse Without Borders series.
  26. discover Discourse Discover: Communities where builders learn together This month's Discover Roundup looks at three communities where builders show up with real projects, hit real problems, and get real help from the people who know.
  27. writing How Discourse Is Becoming a Community of Writers We build software around the idea that long-form conversation beats chat for real thinking - so we started asking why all that thinking was staying inside the company. Here's what happened when we challenged everyone to write publicly.
  28. How We Built the Upcoming Changes System for Gradual Product Rollouts in Discourse How Discourse built a system to roll out product changes without breaking anyone's forum - and why the answer was hiding in the codebase the whole time.
  29. Every Language is Welcome A first post in the Discourse Without Borders series.
  30. ai Three Ways to Deploy AI in Community Platforms (and Why Choice Matters) Most platforms lock operators into a single AI integration; Discourse takes a different approach, offering three distinct deployment paths so communities can choose the model, provider, and level of control that actually fits
  31. case study Elfsight: How a Wishlist Category Shaped 700 Feature Releases How Elfsight turned their Discourse community into a structured product feedback engine - and shipped over 700 features that started as a customer request.
  32. ruby How We Fixed YAML Comment Preservation in Ruby (And Why We Sponsored It) Discourse solved a five-year infrastructure headache by sponsoring psych-pure, a Ruby YAML library that preserves comments through programmatic edits - keeping years of hard-won institutional knowledge intact.
  33. case study Make: Building a Community-Powered Knowledge Hub with Discourse When the automation platform Integromat became Make, they moved their thriving Facebook community to Discourse to create a searchable, durable knowledge hub that serves users far beyond real-time conversation.
  34. ai Your Community as Your AI Knowledge Layer By structuring a community as a forum with clear Q&A, tagged discussions, marked solutions, and searchable archives, you can turn scattered insights into a durable knowledge layer.
  35. discover Discover Roundup: Mac Software Communities This month's Discover Roundup highlights Discourse communities built around beloved indie Apple apps - NetNewsWire, Bear, and Infuse - where developers engage directly with users and peer support becomes searchable knowledge.
  36. community management Before You "Build a Community," Decide: Library or Coffee Shop? We analysed traffic across thousands of Discourse communities and found something intriguing: the internet has been using the word “community” to describe two very different things.
  37. product-management The Product Manager's Guide to Non-Addictive Design Engagement is the metric product teams chase, but maximising time-in-app usually means spending down your users’ time, attention, and well-being.
  38. ai Data Portability Is Table Stakes For Community Builders In The Age Of AI With the growing ubiquity of AI, community builders should consider data portability as table stakes when choosing which platform to focus on. It makes sense to meet people where they are, but it’s not your home unless you h
  39. ai The AI Search Revolution's Hidden Dependency AI search is only as good as its sources. As discovery shifts from keywords to synthesis, forums - with their structured threads and complete context - are becoming the most cited, most trusted knowledge infrastructure on the web.
  40. ai AI Can Code (But It Doesn’t Care About Quality) Every engineer now has a code-producing machine in their hands, but volume rarely equates to quality. How do individual contributors and tech leads maintain standards when it’s suddenly much easier to create than it is to edit?

2025 38

  1. community management 2025: Our Year in Review As 2025 winds down, we reflect on a year of product evolution and change. From launching AI-powered spam detection and the Horizon theme to returning to a profit-first operating model, read about how we’re building a sustainable community future.
  2. discover Discourse Discover: Linux Communities Welcome to our December Discover Roundup, where we highlight communities doing creative and inspiring work with Discourse. This month's theme: Linux (and the tools that make it work!) Framework Framework makes laptops you can actually repair and upgrade
  3. updates Our Commitment to Your Ongoing Success with Discourse We are focusing on our release cycle, improving our support commitments, and investing in the features and product updates that make Discourse the platform of choice for thoughtful online communities.
  4. success stories Discourse Discover: Knowledge Base Through Conversation Welcome to our Discover Roundup, where we highlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse. This month, we’re focusing on a particular kind of community: knowledge bases built on ongoing conversation. The
  5. use cases How Enterprise Migrations to Discourse Actually Work If you’re responsible for an enterprise community, you’ve probably had a version of this conversation already: “Our current platform is creaking. We need better search, better moderation tools, better integrations. But if we move and som
  6. culture Driving Continuous Improvement at Scale Back in 2013, Discourse launched with Rails 3 and Ember 1.0. Over the years, we’ve evolved alongside those frameworks and our many other dependencies - taking full advantage of new features, performance improvements, and modern best practices as they’v
  7. community management How to Communicate the Value of Your Community Every community manager eventually faces the same question from stakeholders: Do we really need a community? It’s a fair question, and one you should be ready to answer. Communities don’t survive on goodwill alone; they depend on co
  8. community management The Death of Community Memory I recently spent forty minutes searching through Slack trying to find a technical decision — made eight months ago — about an app that 60% of my creative life depends on. I knew the conversation had happened. I remembered participating in it. I coul
  9. community management The Community Lifecycle: From Launch to Legacy Every time someone emails Discourse support asking to extend the free trial on one of our hosting plans because “14 days isn’t long enough for the community to take off”, a tiny part of me dies. A decade ago, community builders reco
  10. use cases How Discourse Uses Discourse One of the best things about working at Discourse is that we practice what we preach: we run our 100+ employee company entirely on our own platform. From chatting with coworkers and planning features to tracking bugs, looking up documentation, and even scheduli
  11. success stories Discourse Discover: AI Communities Edition Welcome to our Discourse Discover Roundup, where we spotlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse. Discourse Discover showcases communities that are examples of what happens when thoughtful platform design meets en
  12. ai Discourse MCP is here! As soon as Anthropic open sourced their Model Context Protocol (MCP) proposal for interfacing with AI agents almost a year ago, we started getting excited about how good of a match it was for Discourse. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is Anthropic’s open standard for connectin
  13. design How We Built Horizon with Design Driven Development Horizon is a simple, beautiful theme designed to provide a great user experience for communities without extra effort on the admin’s part. Like most open source software organizations, Discourse started out being primarily engineering driven
  14. On Building Communities in Public: Why I Chose Discourse Over Discord When I first started thinking about building a community around my writing, I did what any reasonable person would do: I looked at what everyone else was doing. Discord servers everywhere. Slack workspaces for the more “Serious Mi
  15. people Why Customer-Facing Experience Makes Better PMs My first tech job was on the customer support desk for a telecommunications software company, where I spent my days answering support tickets and troubleshooting issues over the phone. As I moved through various support roles, I developed skills
  16. community management Community Acquisition Channels: Beyond "Build It and They Will Come" Too many communities are launched with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset, only to find empty discussion boards and disengaged members. Successful community growth doesn’t happen by accident. You nee
  17. people Behind the Scenes: Our 2025 Prague Meetup Every year, we bring our fully remote team together for a week-long meetup. In September 2025, 87 of us gathered in Prague for an unforgettable experience in the only way we know how — chaotic, wholesome, and inspiring. As a company spread across 22 c
  18. community management The Cost of Ephemeral Communication Modern communication is built for the scroll. Think: Slack and Discord chats, disappearing messages, DMs, and social feeds where the stream moves too quickly to be reliably referenced later. The goal is speed and informality. Over the last dec
  19. community management Community Fragmentation: When Growth Becomes Your Obstacle Only the most privileged of community practitioners will make it to retirement without experiencing the stress of chasing growth targets at least once in their career. The majority of us have had a close relationship wit
  20. community management Why Your Community Needs a Home, Not Just a Group Chat We all crave connection. And when we want to bring people together, the easiest option is to spin up a group chat. It feels natural — everyone’s already on their phones, and the barrier to entry is basically zero. But if you
  21. online community The end of community memory? An experience I think a lot of us have these days in our interactions online, whether it be in the workplace, on social media, or even in real life is “We’ve had this conversation before…” It’s perfectly natural. Different subsets of people come together
  22. community management The Hawk Origin Story (A Community Builder’s Privacy Paradox) The Paradox Defined The privacy paradox is the delta that exists between our attitude towards protecting our personal privacy and reality of the way we behave online. Had I known about this incongruity when I first en
  23. community management How to Optimize Community Content for AI Discovery AI has turned search into answers. People ask a question, get one synthesized response, and see a small handful of cited sources. If your community is one of those sources, you win trust, traffic, and pipeline. But how do you ge
  24. community management Building Communities That Think Social media and instant messaging fundamentally changed how we talk to each other. The paragraph has ceded power to fast moving and ephemeral chat that inevitably leans toward the shallow and reactive. Easy and immediate access to information, ha
  25. community management Avoid 6 common pitfalls when measuring the ROI of your community Sometimes, knowing what not to do is a good way to get better at something. We’ve put together a list of the common missteps that community managers make when attempting to measure the ROI of their community. Avoid
  26. seo SEO for AI: How Community Content Wins in New Search The Search Revolution is Here We don’t click on links like we used to. When an AI summary appears on Google, we visit traditional links only half as often as when no summary is shown. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews have
  27. community management Strategies for keeping children safe in your online community We are at a point in the evolution of online behaviour where privacy and safety are finally getting the attention they deserve. Around the world, new laws and standards are changing how online spaces operate, especial
  28. people How we help enterprise communities do more with Discourse We know that building community isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every organization has its own voice, values, and vision, and your community platform should be able to accommodate yours. Our out-of-the-box software is powerful, and when your
  29. updates Unboxing Discourse 3.5 After six months of steady improvements in our beta releases, we’re excited to announce our latest release, Discourse 3.5. This release, we focused on improving both the member and community management experience. We’ve rolled out Horizon, our sleek modern theme; a new
  30. success stories How Ask Discourse became Andela’s go-to AI community management assistant At Discourse, we believe that community builders should always have a place to turn when they have questions. That’s why we created Ask Discourse, an AI-powered assistant that helps community admins solve probl
  31. community management How to prepare your community for a Discourse migration A community rarely changes their platform lightly. The motivation is often to improve the experience, enhance functionality, and ensure the platform evolves alongside the community. Still, change is hard. When you announce
  32. success stories How to Launch an Enterprise Community in 30 Days with Discourse Building an enterprise community from scratch in just 30 days might sound impossible. It’s not. In fact, Jordan Violet, the Vice President of Community and Engagement at Netwrix, has done it. In this post, we’re walking
  33. success stories How Celigo doubled their community engagement after migrating to Discourse We love celebrating our customers and their success with Discourse, but it’s especially exciting when that success comes quickly and shows the impact a strong community can have. After his LinkedIn post caught
  34. updates Discourse and the Fediverse! Two years ago, we started working on a plugin that brings Discourse and the Fediverse closer together. Discourse communities are online spaces that facilitate open collaboration and communication. The Fediverse offers ways to expand the reach of Discourse communi
  35. community management 20 Community Metrics Explained Understanding the language of community metrics gives you a leg up when communicating your community’s value to stakeholders. It also helps you identify what’s working, where to improve, and how to make data-driven decisions that strengthen your st
  36. community management A guide to selecting the right metrics for your community How do you know if your community is having a positive effect on the broader organization it represents? Where do you turn when you have to defend the existence of your community? Metrics. They tell the story of your comm
  37. updates Unpacking Discourse 3.4 Here at Discourse, we’re always striving to make community management easier. That’s why Discourse 3.4 has introduced a more consistent admin experience, a simplified signup and login flow, mobile app improvements, and AI-powered tools to fight spam and help manage yo
  38. success stories Sonar's 25-Cent Solution to Spam Detection “As soon as we turned it on, it was night and day.” - Colin Mueller, Community Manager at Sonar, describing the impact of implementing Discourse AI to address a sudden and disruptive spam attack. About Sonar Sonar, the creators of SonarQube,

2024 11

  1. community management The importance of data ownership for community leaders A community’s data is more than just numbers and names; it reflects the community’s pulse—what members care about, discuss, and engage with. This data includes all of the knowledge generated through those discussions which s
  2. use cases Discourse: A Team Collaboration Tool While Discourse is widely recognized as powerful open-source forum software, Discourse has also served as our primary workplace/team collaboration tool from the very beginning. Many other companies and organizations have found incredible value in using
  3. updates Introducing the new Starter Plan! We’re excited to announce the new Starter plan, the easiest and fastest way to launch a community with Discourse. Starter offers public or private sites with unlimited members at $20 a month! Our vision is to empower everyone to create vibrant online spaces
  4. success stories Celebrating a Decade of Discourse Happy Anniversary to us! On August 26, 2014, we released Discourse v1.0 and introduced hosting services. We have been full throttle ever since. Now that we’ve hit this milestone we’re taking a look back to see how far we’ve come. Discourse milestones
  5. updates Celebrating Discourse 3.3 Discourse 3.3 is here! This new release contains powerful new features to enhance the discoverability of your community and the content within it. With Discourse Discover, members can easily find and join your community, even when on-the-go by using the Discourse Hu
  6. success stories How Revolut built a thriving community with Discourse Editor’s note: Revolut's community is no longer active, but this story remains available as a look at how they approached community building and growth during their time with Discourse. Every day, customers are building, growing,
  7. updates Discover: A New Way to Engage with Discourse Communities We are excited to announce the official launch of Discourse Discover! Our brand-new initiative answers the question: Who else is using Discourse? Discover and connect with Discourse communities from technology and gaming to niche hobbi
  8. success stories A Warm Welcome to Spiceworks! We are thrilled to share the move of the Spiceworks community to Discourse! All about Spiceworks As a professional network for the IT industry, Spiceworks offers the latest IT news, a variety of management tools, and a thriving community. When you visit
  9. success stories Why DevX innovator Okteto migrated from Slack to Discourse In software development, access to a collaborative community can be a game-changer as it enables shared problem-solving and continuous learning. We connected with Ramiro Berrelleza, the founder of Okteto, who launched his com
  10. remote work Leveraging Community to Build A Culture of Inclusivity in Remote Workplaces Building an intentional workplace community is one of the best tools that we have found to support our people in feeling connected to something that is even greater than the work we do together. Last year, our wo
  11. updates Celebrating Discourse 3.2 Discourse 3.2 is complete! This release includes significant improvements to chat, new AI powered features, and many updates for admins and moderators. We’re making it easier to participate in meaningful conversations on the go with Discourse Chat, including an impr

2023 16

  1. updates Related Topics: Enhancing Content Exploration At Discourse we are always working to elevate your community experience. Our Discourse AI modules are designed to make both the management and member experience of your community easier, simpler, faster, and hopefully, more fun. We previously int
  2. success stories Community Monetization: How eCommerceFuel Monetized their Niche Community At Discourse, our users form the heart of what we do. While our forum and online community tools are free and open-source, we also offer hosting services for those who want a smoother setup and management exper
  3. updates Introducing AI Bot Our Discourse AI modules are designed to make your community experience easier, simpler, faster and hopefully, more fun. Today, we’re excited to announce the “AI Bot” module, which uses the power of conversation to help you get any of your questions, suggestions, recommend
  4. community management Online Community Engagement: Understanding Lurkers In a time where connection and belonging have never been more essential, online communities have the potential to offer members the remarkable gift of being seen and heard. These virtual spaces, with their vast reach and diverse
  5. success stories How STEM-Away® Connects Students from over 400 Colleges to Opportunities using Discourse Starting With a Vision Transitioning from academics to the professional world can present a challenge for students as they embark on the search for meaningful employment. Debaleena Das, founder o
  6. updates Discourse 3.1 is here! Today, we are pleased to announce Discourse 3.1! Filled with features for members and admins alike, this version includes chat threads, a more customizable sidebar, improved search and numerous other improvements. This release is accompanied by the launch of our Discou
  7. success stories How Lawrence Systems Built a Thriving Community using Discourse Discourse allows you to build the community the way you want and it allows you very strong control over that community and I think you grow a better community. The internet has long served as a virtual gathering place wh
  8. technology Running Ruby 3.2's YJIT in Production at Discourse At Discourse, we have been eager to adopt YJIT ever since Shopify’s Ruby & Rails Infrastructure team declared it production-ready. After witnessing promising local benchmarks, we began running our production Rails applications with Ruby 3
  9. success stories How The OT Potential Club Used Discourse to Turn Their Low-Cost MVP into a Thriving Community “I remember in our early discussion, we were looking at around $100,000 to build out the features we wanted. But, with Discourse, we were able to launch our MVP for $5,000 and start testing
  10. updates Introducing Discourse AI We are happy to announce Discourse AI, the first step in integrating Artificial Intelligence with Discourse communities. Our new plugin is our one-stop solution offering both new features and enhancing existing ones. With this first release, we are shipping 7 differe
  11. success stories Discourse Named One of the Americas' Fastest Growing Companies We are excited to announce that Discourse has been recognized as one of the Americas' fastest growing companies 2023 by Financial Times and Statista. This recognition is a testament to our commitment to providing a high-q
  12. success stories How Discourse Scaled to $10M ARR With Only 1 Salesperson It all began in 2013 with a vision – and a small team of engineers building a product that would disrupt the rapidly stagnating online forum space. While we didn’t specifically call it out at the time, we were going to market w
  13. updates Discourse Gives Back: 2022 Edition This past year we saw a lot of growth at Discourse. We added over 20 people to our team, and we worked hard to release a chat feature that was a huge step in allowing short, casual conversations without a third party plugin. We also worked towards releasing
  14. Sam Saffron and Sarah Hawk named Discourse Co-CEOs If I’ve learned anything about community in the last 10 years working at Discourse, it is that all lasting community comes from a place of shared leadership, not merely by the people at the top, but including everyone who regularly participates. Eve
  15. success stories Why SailPoint Chose Discourse's Professional Services to lead their Redesign Discourse offers a variety of professional services to our Enterprise hosted customers. We had the opportunity to collaborate with SailPoint on their developer community redesign. We spoke with Jordan Violet
  16. updates Discourse 3.0 is Here! Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Discourse 3.0! We are bringing our customers and users some major new capabilities to enable communities to have thoughtful, purposeful discussions online. This new release includes real-time chat and user status to enabl

2022 28

  1. tools Looking Back with the Yearly Review Plugin As we enter the holiday season we start to look back and reflect on all the things that we have or haven’t accomplished (RIP my diet resolutions) in the last year. At Discourse our Yearly Review plugin creates a topic on January 1st every year that sh
  2. community management Dealing with Toxicity in Online Communities Online communities are places where people should be able to come together to share ideas and learn from each other in an environment that is safe and enjoyable to participate in. In healthy communities, members follow established guid
  3. success stories How Elastic Bolsters Community Support with Discourse Automation The Elastic community has been around for longer than the company itself and includes users, contributors, and customers of Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack products which are available as “free and open” [https://ww
  4. community management Enough With the Water Bottles and T-shirts… Everyone loves good swag, but the key to motivating the behaviours you want to see in your community is focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic motivation is based on internal incentive such as pleasure or intere
  5. updates Our New Basic Plan Is Now Available. Try It Out Today! Today, we’re adding the Basic plan to our hosting lineup for groups, clubs, teams, and other small, private communities who need more than just a chat group to connect, keep in touch, collaborate, and create a shared long term memory. On
  6. success stories How Katalon Increased Community Engagement with Discourse Hosting Every day, customers are building, growing, and running successful communities powered by Discourse. Today, we’re highlighting one of them who improved how their company engages with their external community by upgradi
  7. community management There are Two Types of Ideas – Bad Ideas and Ideas Worth Testing While push-button solutions are quick and simple, they prevent us from really understanding the landscape in front of us, identifying how to drive improvements, and exploring the optimal pathway to success. When I
  8. community management Not Everyone Wants to Talk to Your Community Manager The greatest asset any business can have is good relationships with their customers, and communities are a powerful environment to not just foster those relationships, but to do so in an environment where the world can see how
  9. community management Less vs. More: The Battle for Better Communities We live in a world where more is more. People are cranking out more content, posting more to social media, watching more movies, eating more food… abundance is the name of the game, it would seem. But… more doesn’t always mean bet
  10. updates Discourse Chat is now available. Try it out today! Discourse Chat [https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-chat/230881] is now available to everyone as an open beta and is 100% free and open source [https://github.com/discourse/discourse-chat], as always. At Discourse we have long believed in
  11. community management A Strategy For Making the Most of Community Health Metrics Community health metrics can be overwhelming and trying to track everything is probably not going to deliver the results that you are hoping for. So which ones should you choose and how do you use them to your best advan
  12. success stories How carwow Improved Remote Work by Using Discourse Every day, customers are building, growing, and running successful communities powered by Discourse. Today, we're highlighting one of them who improved how their company collaborates remotely with an internal community. Who is carwow
  13. community management Why Your Community Didn't Take Off (and How to Fix it) Spoiler: It can't compete with Netflix. Too often we hear from customers who have tried and failed to get their community off the ground. They put in time and effort getting it all set up and then find that it's a constant s
  14. tools What Is Asynchronous Communication? If you have ever said or heard someone say “Can you just send it to me through….” In that case, you have experienced the world of asynchronous communications. Asynchronous communication is any type of communication where one supplies or requests information,
  15. online community Free Discourse Communities For Creators We would like to help creators build their communities. If you are a creator building on the web, then you might be eligible for a free, hosted Discourse community.
  16. remote work The Home Office Desks of Discourse A few of our teammates have (graciously) agreed to share a glimpse into their home workspaces, including the gear and elements of the space itself they love.
  17. technology Publish Your Community on the Windows Store Did you know that you can make your existing (or brand new) Discourse site into a Microsoft Windows Store app? If you have a user base that mainly uses Windows and will benefit from the deeper OS integration, like being pinned to the taskbar or
  18. getting started Getting Started with Discourse - Part 1: Discourse Setup If just getting the feel of using Discourse for the first time, you might be wondering what's the best place to start. Our friend Jono Bacon [https://www.jonobacon.com/], a leading community manager and consultant, put together
  19. getting started Getting Started with Discourse - Part 2: Discussions and Trust Levels In this post, we're continuing our video series on Getting Started with Discourse. If you missed it, check out part one [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2022/02/getting-started-with-discou
  20. getting started Getting Started with Discourse - Part 3: Admin and Analytics In this post, we're wrapping up our Getting Started with Discourse series. If you missed part one [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2022/02/getting-started-with-discourse-by-jono-bacon-part-1/] or p
  21. online community Audience vs. Community: What's the Difference? Audience and community are similar enough they basically seem to be the same thing. In reality, this is quite far from the truth. In this article, we're going to dive into the definitions of audience and community, the differences betwe
  22. online community How Social Networks Differ from Communities On the surface, a social network and an online community can appear very similar. They both bring people together to share and discuss in a digital context. But when you dig in, there are stark differences between these two. In this articl
  23. online community Organizing Your Online Community Organization, while it may seem straightforward, is a crucial component of building a healthy community. How effectively your community is organized can affect just how much new and existing members engage with one another. In this article, we'll unp
  24. updates Discourse 2.8 Released! Today we release Discourse 2.8, building on Discourse 2.7 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2021/05/discourse-2-7-released/] from May 2021. For post 2.0 releases we’ve chosen a new set of codenames [https://meta.discourse.org/t/codenames-for-p
  25. online community The Eight Best Places to Build a Private Community Building and running private communities is becoming a more important endeavor for creators, cohorts, coaches, companies, and more. People are looking for a safe space to connect with others online, and a private community is one wa
  26. updates Discourse Gives Back: 2021 Edition Discourse had a great year. We raised a $20 million Series A investment and grew to 56 people... but we couldn’t have done it without you! And now, as we do at the end of every year, it’s time to give back. As an open source project ourselves,
  27. online community Private Communities: What They Are and How to Build One What is a private community? A private community is similar to its counterpart, public online communities, in that it’s a place for a group of people to come together for a common purpose, interest, or vision – doing so via the
  28. online community Improve Your Community Experience Using a DIY Community Health Check Communities are living, breathing systems. They can either be growing, thriving, stale or dying, and this state of the community is defined by the community’s health. A healthy community is filled with growth. But

2021 24

  1. technology Discourse on a Raspberry Pi A long standing feature request from our community is finally here! As of today, you are able to host a complete Discourse instance in a $35 Raspberry Pi. You can go ahead and follow our official install guide [https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/main/d
  2. online community The Six Types of Online Communities (with Examples of Each) An online community brings together people who wouldn’t normally connect with each other in the real world. Businesses, creators, and brands alike are all realizing the power of creating community in the digital landscape.
  3. community management Celebrate Your Community with a Year in Review The end of the year is a time full of celebrations. It’s also a great time to celebrate your community’s most impactful members and discussions. While digging up the data to find these users and topics can be time consuming, we’ve m
  4. seo Handling SEO for Discourse Communities If you are concerned about how your community is performing in search engine results (SEO), there are a number of questions to keep in mind when looking to optimize your community software of choice. We frequently get asked questions in our support inboxes
  5. success stories How Let’s Encrypt Uses Community to Provide Free Support To Over 40% of the World’s Internet As part of our ongoing series of interviews with customers [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/tag/use-cases], our latest is with Sarah Gran [https://www.linkedin.com/i
  6. remote work Building an Emotionally Sustainable Company In many ways, our company seemed well-positioned for the COVID-19 pandemic. We'd already been a 100% remote company, spread across many time zones and countries. We'd learned to use tools (like Discourse!) asynchronously to communicate and work
  7. seo Eight Tips to Improve Your Community's SEO Helping people find your community takes time and patience. It also takes a little knowledge about search engines, how they work, and how people locate your community through them. In this article, we’re going to demystify the basics of SEO and how you
  8. online community Facebook Groups: A Guide on When to Use Them and When to Seek Alternatives For a fledgling community, Facebook Groups are often seen as the leading standard. They’re easy to access, come with a built-in audience, and require little to no knowledge to get started. But are Facebook Gr
  9. technology Who's at Fault: Tracking Down Segfaults in Production Within complex applications and hosting environments, segfaults can manifest themselves in a myriad of weird and wonderful symptoms. For Discourse the application, this may be a notification email failing to send, or an uploaded image
  10. online community A Simple, 5-Step Strategy to Kickstart Your New Community So you’re interested in starting a community on the Internet. Great! It might seem like the best idea to just grab your nearest social software and start talking about your passion. That’s a great way to get yourself moving,
  11. remote work Managing Work and Workloads on Remote Teams with Discourse We’ve done things a little differently here at Discourse since we started in 2013. Instead of being co-located in one place, we’re a globally distributed team [https://discourse.org/team]. For the most part, we’ve removed time zo
  12. online community Five Essential Features of an Online Community Platform Choosing the right community platform can be difficult. With the variety of feature sets available, it can be difficult to know what's most important for your community. In this post, we’re going to take a look at what we think
  13. tools Skittish: A Playful, Audio-First Space for Virtual Events and Gatherings - Cool Community Tech Sometimes community technology is so freaking cool, you can't help but share it! This time around, we're chatting with Andy Baio, creator of Skittish, a playful, audio-first virtual space for hosting
  14. online community What is Online Community? Everyone everywhere is looking for community. Sometimes community is found in person. Other times it’s found elsewhere. One of the most prominent alternative places to find community is online. So what is an online community? Let’s find out! In this article
  15. updates Discourse Announces $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital We're pleased to announce that Discourse has taken $20 million in Series A investment from Pace Capital, joined by our seed investors, First Round Capital. It's been quite a journey since our seed foundation
  16. success stories How UiPath Built a Successful Product Community with Discourse Every day, customers are building, growing, and running successful communities powered by Discourse. Today, we're highlighting one of them. Who are UiPath? UiPath [https://uipath.com], a leading enterprise automation soft
  17. use cases Keys to Building a Successful Support Community Starting a support community is a great way to involve your customers in the discussion around your products or services. In fact, it's an easy way to increase the overall quality of your customer experience [https://civilized-discourse-const
  18. technology Faster (and smaller) uploads in Discourse with Rust, WebAssembly and MozJPEG As of a few weeks ago, image uploads in Discourse are faster AND smaller thanks to a technique that compresses and optimizes the images clientside before they are uploaded. This blog post will describe how this f
  19. use cases Five Ways Support Communities Improve Customer Experience Here at Discourse, we utilize a support community [https://meta.discourse.org] to provide service to both our self-hosted and paid hosting customers. Our customers have direct access to the team that makes the software -- resulting
  20. use cases Discord and Discourse - Better Together Here's a question we get a lot — Discourse and Discord. They sound awfully similar, but are they the same? https://www.discourse.org/aboutDiscourse is completely open source teamwork software, designed for asynchronous written conversation, building
  21. updates Discourse 2.7 Released! Today we release Discourse 2.7, building on Discourse 2.6 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2020/11/discourse-2-6-released/] from last November. For post 2.0 releases we’ve chosen a new set of codenames [https://meta.discourse.org/t/codenames-
  22. people Discourse team grows to 50 It's been a long, long time since we wrote about growing our team to 20 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2017/11/discourse-team-grows-to-20/] . The last few years have been good to us and as a result, we've grown steadily
  23. use cases Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant Elephant: Upgrading Discourse to PostgreSQL 13 When the Discourse project started, way back in 2013, the team had to pick and choose between a handful tools into what would become our "stack", the foundational software on which Discourse would be built
  24. use cases Discourse Essentials Starter Kit Want to use Discourse but unsure about where to start? This curated list of articles will help enhance your Discourse knowledge right away! Discourse New User Guide [https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-new-user-guide/96331] Dive into your first Discourse

2020 7

  1. updates Discourse 2.6 released! Today we release Discourse 2.6, building on Discourse 2.5 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2020/06/discourse-2-5-released/] from June. For post 2.0 releases we've chosen a new set of codenames [https://meta.discourse.org/t/codenames-for-post-
  2. updates Discourse for Teams is here! Editor’s note: Discourse Teams plan was sunset in April 2022. If you are looking for a home for your team we recommend checking out our current plans. Today we launch Discourse for Teams. Teams is affordably priced, privacy-focused, and comes pre-configured with
  3. updates Discourse Still Gives Back When Discourse Gives Back [https://blog.discourse.org/2017/12/discourse-gives-back-2017/] was last published in 2017, we were delighted and humbled to see the wider Discourse community resonate with our mission to give back to the open source projects we rely on. W
  4. updates Discourse 2.5 released! Today we release Discourse 2.5, building on Discourse 2.4 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2020/02/discourse-2-4-released/] from February. For post 2.0 releases we've chosen a new set of codenames [https://meta.discourse.org/t/codenames-for-p
  5. updates COVID-19 and Discourse The world is in the midst of a global pandemic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic]. I'm sure you've seen a lot of these messages, so we'll get right to the point. As a completely free open source tool
  6. updates Discourse 2.4 released! Today we release Discourse 2.4, building on Discourse 2.3 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2019/06/discourse-2-3-released/] from last year. For post 2.0 releases we've chosen a new set of codenames [https://meta.discourse.org/t/codenames-for-
  7. use cases Discourse for Science and Academia A sizable number of Science and Research communities rely on Discourse for their discussion needs; let's take a deeper look and figure out why. We've spoken to an assortment of customers and self-hosted sites to learn more about their use cases and determ

2019 5

  1. infrastructure Discourse Official Hosting Now Available in EU Yes! Starter, Pro and Business hosting is now available in the EU. Early this year we deployed additional bare-metal hosting in Europe. Until now the EU region was only available to our Enterprise customers, but we are pleased to announce
  2. updates Presentations on Discourse If you'd like a deeper dive into the philosophy of Discourse, the project -- what it is, what it set out to do, and why it exists -- I can recommend a few presentations and podcasts I've done over the years which go deeper on background than what
  3. security Slack Security Incident From mid 2014 to January 2018, Discourse used Slack as an internal chat tool. In February 2015, Slack had a security incident [https://slackhq.com/march-2015-security-incident-and-the-launch-of-two-factor-authentication] , and notified any accounts of "suspicious act
  4. updates Discourse 2.3 released! Today we release Discourse 2.3, building on Discourse 2.2 from February. For post 2.0 releases we've chosen a new set of codenames based on the history of human communication; this release is Vinca. Completely overhauled flag and review system Arguably the the biggest
  5. updates Discourse 2.2 released! Today we release Discourse 2.2, building on Discourse 2.1 from September 2018. For post 2.0 releases we've chosen a new set of codenames based on the history of human communication; this release is La Pasiega. UI refinements For consistency with mobile and to free up

2018 12

  1. partners Free hosting for Patreon creators NOTE: This announcement has been superseded by our new Free plan. Nearly two years ago we started very carefully experimenting with free hosting of open source projects. We recently rolled out the v2 of this program for open source projects, and today we're
  2. partners Free Hosting for Open Source v2 Nearly two years ago we started very carefully experimenting with free hosting of open source projects. Today we're announcing the next iteration of our free hosting program, casting a much wider net this time. Free Discourse Hosting For Your Open Source Proj
  3. use cases Discourse as an ideation platform People sometimes ask how Discourse compares to the likes of UserVoice and other ideation platforms, where ideas get voted on and the best ideas rise to the top. One thing many companies find appealing with these platforms is that a vote-powered ranking of
  4. updates Discourse 2.1 released! Today we release Discourse 2.1, building on Discourse 2.0 from May. We've chosen a new set of codenames for releases starting with 2.1 that are based on the history of human communication. This release is Bhimbetka, and the next two will be La Pasiega and
  5. culture Launching a Successful Discourse Community While we've offered general tips for building a Discourse community [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/08/building-a-discourse-community/] , we also get a lot of questions about what specifically you can do to help launc
  6. culture Understanding Discourse Trust Levels Originally published June 2018 by Jeff Atwood. Updated December 2025. 💡This post has remained one of our most-visited resources for good reason: trust levels form the foundation of how Discourse communities scale healthy participation. While the core phil
  7. updates Discourse 2.0 released! We released Discourse 2.0 on May 31st, building on Discourse 1.9 from January. New Admin Dashboard We've completely redesigned the admin dashboard to show off your most relevant and essential community health metrics right at the top, as well as trending searches. 0:0
  8. infrastructure HTTPS by Default Here at Discourse World HQ, we’re firm believers in the value of security. We fund a public bug bounty program, and we document our security policy and procedures right in the repo. Securing traffic between a forum’s server and its users is important, too, and we’ve h
  9. use cases Effectively using Discourse together with group chat Most modern businesses and organisations today are using some kind of team chat application. The usual suspects are Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Mattermost, Rocket Chat, and Matrix, to name a few [https://alternativeto.net/software/s
  10. culture Discourse in Outreachy Summer 2018 tl;dr: Discourse will be participating in Outreachy Summer. If you are eligible to participate in this internship, please consider applying [https://www.outreachy.org/2018-may-august/communities/discourse/#testing]! About Outreachy Participants of Outreachy
  11. use cases How Does Team Discourse Use Discourse? - 2018 Editor's note: We’ve revisited this topic in a new blog post with updated details on how we use Discourse today. Check it out here. As we claim on our website, we use Discourse as our primary team coordination tool to build… Discourse! * Collab
  12. updates Discourse 1.9 released! We released Discourse 1.9 on January 3rd, building on Discourse 1.8 from last June. Show Who's Replying Discourse is all about replies being disconnected in time and space, but we agree that showing when people are actually replying to a topic is genuinely useful in a

2017 17

  1. updates Discourse Gives Back 2017 We've had a fantastic year at Discourse, growing our team [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2017/11/discourse-team-grows-to-20/] to 20 21 people. (There's also something exciting and major happening early in 2018 that we've worked hard on
  2. infrastructure An Instrumentation Story (How I Learned to Love the Elastic Stack) in which we discover a better way to meet our customer's needs while showing us where we can improve our code When you're operating a hosting service it's essential to know what's going on. Visibility into your environ
  3. people Discourse team grows to 20 Over the last few months we’ve added a whopping 9 members to the Discourse team! We held off on any big announcements until our new team page [https://www.discourse.org/team] was ready for primetime. Behold the first twenty! Drawings courtesy of the excellent Nick S
  4. design It's Time We Talked About Tags Consider the typical sections of a daily newspaper: Arts, Sports, Business, Travel, Local, and World. Any given article belongs to just one of those sections, and the content in each section is quite different, such that some people, for example, may only ever r
  5. partners GSoC 2017 ends - Outreachy winter round begins Since May this year [https://blog.discourse.org/2017/02/summer-of-code-2017/] we’ve been working with a handful of incredibly talented students. Google Summer of Code 2017 has now concluded, and we have some kick-ass new features to show for it
  6. updates Who is Discobot? As of Discourse 1.8, every new user who joins will get a welcome PM from discobot: Discobot is a natural extension of our original, static welcome PM. However, Discobot is much more than a greeter; it also offers to interactively "play" the Discourse game with each new
  7. partners Boost your Patreon page with Discourse Interest-based forums are perhaps the ultimate community experience. These oases on the internet are where you realise that geeking out big-time on knitting, robotics, fantasy football or what-have-you is totally a thing, and there’s no shortage of lik
  8. updates Discourse 1.8 released! We're thrilled to release Discourse 1.8 today, building on Discourse 1.7 from January. Narrative Welcome Bot Perhaps the biggest new feature in this release is our narrative welcome bot, which greets new users with a personal message and offers to interactively "play"
  9. use cases Discourse for Developer Communities Most early adopters of Discourse were developer communities, as is often the case with open source projects. Our own meta.discourse.org community is also a development-centric community, so we've been mindful of this use case since practically Day 0. Con
  10. updates A brand new discourse.org This week we unveiled a completely revamped discourse.org! When our original website was first launched in 2013, Discourse's features were quite novel. Concepts like "infinite scrolling", "dynamic notifications" and "mobile-friendly" were state of the art for open s
  11. people Moving from Facebook Groups to Discourse The following is a guest post by Martin Eriksson @meriksson [https://meta.discourse.org/users/meriksson/] Update: Unfortunately due to changes to Facebook's API it is no longer possible to extract Facebook data for migration. If you're considering usin
  12. updates Discourse API Documentation Released! Today we would like to announce our much anticipated Official API Docs! You can find them at: http://docs.discourse.org Today, more than ever, an application needs to be able to integrate with other applications and the Discourse API allows you to easily
  13. partners Summer of Code 2017 This summer, Discourse will be participating in three different "summer of code" projects! Google Summer of Code 2017 First of all, we're happy to announce that we've been accepted into Google Summer of Code [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/] for the 2nd time in a
  14. culture The Discourse Encouragement Fund For almost a year now, we’ve been doing something that’s considered quite risky [http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html] for an open source project: Paying contributors. Communities like ours are fundamentally
  15. updates Discourse's Fourth Birthday As of today*, it's been four years of Discourse! It feels like only only yesterday [https://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/] that we launched Discourse as an open source project. We've certainly been busy for the last four years: * 1 official non-be
  16. use cases Discourse for Private Communities There are many reasons why a community might be private: Paid memberships; a company intranet; a sensitive subject matter; beta testers; a grassroots movement building momentum before going public. Whatever the reason, we want Discourse to function well in
  17. updates Discourse 1.7 released! Today, after four months of work, we're proud to release Discourse 1.7. * Discourse 1.2 – Feb 2015 * Discourse 1.3 – June 2015 * Discourse 1.4 – September 2015 * Discourse 1.5 – April 2016 * Discourse 1.6 – August 2016 Official iOS and Android Apps Thanks to Sam Saffr

2016 17

  1. culture Discourse New User Tips and Tricks Originally published December 2016 by Jeff Atwood. Updated December 2025. 💡These practical techniques help community managers work smarter, not harder. Discourse has evolved significantly since this post was first published in 2016, adding new tools and cap
  2. use cases Discourse for Maker Communities There is a thing called the "maker movement" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture] and, well, it's awesome. People are setting up shop in their basements, backyards or dedicated makerspaces to create things together. Makers openly exchanging their id
  3. updates Official Slack integration for Discourse Editor’s note: We no longer support this Slack plugin as we offer a chat integration plugin for external chat systems, including Slack, that you wish to connect to your Discourse community. Today we're making Slack chat a first class integration, avai
  4. coding Announcing v1.0 of WP Discourse We are pleased to announce the v1.0 release of WP Discourse [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-discourse/], our official WordPress plugin. A huge thanks goes out to Simon Cossar [http://scossar.com] who spearheaded this push towards a stable release. We'd also l
  5. use cases Discourse for Online Education Communities Just like our survey for game communities [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2016/05/discourse-for-game-communities/] back in May, we once more sent out a survey to a mix of customers and self-supported Discourse communitie
  6. updates Discourse 1.6 Released! We're thrilled to announce that today marks the release of Discourse 1.6! * Discourse 1.2 – Feb 2015 * Discourse 1.3 – June 2015 * Discourse 1.4 – September 2015 * Discourse 1.5 – April 2016 Enhanced Security Like any responsible open source project, we take security
  7. updates Reply-by-email enabled for all Discourse customers After a few weeks of testing, we are now introducing reply-by-email to all our hosted customers. Every email notification your users receive from now on will include the notice "reply to this email to respond" in the footer. Replying by emai
  8. use cases Discourse for Game Communities About a week ago we sent out a brief survey to the game-maker segment of our customer base, looking for some insights on how they make the most out of Discourse, and what else they'd like to see added to it. Game companies have been some of
  9. partners Using Discourse as a community-powered wiki > The following is a guest post by Sam Nazarko [http://samnazarko.co.uk/], CEO and founder of OSMC.tv Are you using Discourse in a novel way? If you're interested in writing a guest post like this one, please get in touch [erlend@discourse.org]. I
  10. coding Beginner's Guide to Creating Discourse Plugins Part of our important work with Rails Girls [http://railsgirls.com/] in 2014 and 2015 was not just to mentor and encourage new developers, but also evolve Discourse into a platform that's generally friendly and easy for developers to build on. We
  11. updates Discourse 1.5 Released! We're proud to announce that today marks the release of Discourse 1.5! This was a huge release that took us almost 7 months to build: * Discourse 1.2 – Feb 2015 * Discourse 1.3 – June 2015 * Discourse 1.4 – September 2015 5× Faster Topic Page Perhaps the most
  12. updates Switching Your Discourse from Mandrill to Mailgun Self-hosted Discourse requires email to function, so we've always had a symbiotic relationship with third party email providers. In the past we've recommended Mandrill, we use it ourselves for some of our sites, and we've had nothing but posi
  13. culture The ideal GSoC applicant This is our first year participating in Google Summer of Code. In short, if you're a student with some Rails & Ember skills, you should check out our GSoC profile [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5787017325576192/] and consider applying for a chance
  14. partners Free Discourse forum hosting for community-friendly GitHub projects NOTE: This announcement should be considered deprecated and out of date, as it has been superseded by "Free Hosting for Open Source v2". Discourse is proudly and unconditionally 100% open source ever since our public launch
  15. updates Discourse's Third Birthday As of today, it's been three years since we launched [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2013/02/the-discourse-team/] Discourse as a public project. How time flies when you're having fun! [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghos
  16. culture A Year in Discourse - Recap of 2015 Discourse is a large open source project [https://github.com/discourse/discourse] buzzing with activity, so a lot of cool things happen over the course of a year. Let's look back at 2015 and pick out some highlights. Our Most Popular Topic of 2015 The most
  17. success stories How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO As part of our ongoing series of interviews with customers, our latest is with John Mardlin who helps traders, devs and humans use bitcoin at Coinbase — partly through their Discourse-powered community. What is Coinbase

2015 14

  1. updates Emoji and Discourse We've always had a strong relationship with Emoji. From the earliest days of Discourse, you could add Emoji to your posts by by typing : and using our handy Emoji autocompleter: Of course : just so happens to be the first character of the most common ASCII smiley, our old
  2. partners Discourse selected for Mozilla Open Source Support program In late October Mozilla announced something called the Mozilla Open Source Support Program [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/23/mozilla-launches-open-source-support-program/] . Their selection criteria seemed favourable towards
  3. people Discourse Team Grows by 50% The Discourse team has grown slowly: * Jeff, Robin, Sam, Neil [https://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/] launch team (Feb 2013) * Régis [https://blog.discourse.org/2013/09/welcome-regis-hanol-to-the-discourse-team/] joins (Sep 2013) * Arpit [https://b
  4. infrastructure Shorewall+Docker: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together As has been mentioned previously [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2015/01/our-discourse-hosting-configuration/], we lurve us some Docker here at Discourse. We also lurve us some security, and I've r
  5. hardware Our New Datacenter Cabinet As Discourse grows, we're adding more server capacity and newer servers to make sure our hosting [https://discourse.org/buy] remains blazing fast. We have one server cabinet [https://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/the-discourse-servers/] at Hurricane Electric, which w
  6. updates Discourse 1.4 Released! It looks like we're on a solid cadence to deliver a new version of Discourse about every 4 months: * Discourse 1.2 – Feb 2015 * Discourse 1.3 – June 2015 And you know what that means … Discourse 1.4 ships today! The focus of this release was UI improvements
  7. culture Choice of Games and Discourse We don't consider Discourse successful unless the communities using Discourse are thriving and growing. And no community we host has thrived quite like Choice of Games [https://www.choiceofgames.com]. Their Discourse has absolutely exploded over the last year, t
  8. culture OpenROV and Discourse We measure Discourse's success as an open source project by one simple metric: are Discourse communities working? Is your community working? We recently interviewed Brian Adams [http://badevguru.ghost.io/] of OpenROV to discuss how they use Discourse and get some specif
  9. updates Discourse 1.3 released! With the help of our community and our customers, we're proud to release Discourse 1.3 today, following our 1.2 release from February. The focus of this release was new features, as requested by our customers and users. Anonymous posts 0:00/1× For sites where the
  10. people Welcome Arpit Jalan to the Discourse team It's been almost two years since someone joined the Discourse team, but we're speeding things up this year as our hosting service expands. Today we'd like to officially welcome Arpit Jalan from Jodhpur, India to the Discourse team. Here's what you nee
  11. people We're Hiring a Sysadmin > Update: As of June 1st, 2015, this position is now filled. Discourse has been growing by leaps and bounds, and we're deep into the 1.3 release [https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-version-1-3/22046], which has some exciting new features. Along with this growth,
  12. updates Discourse 1.2 released With the help of our community and our customers, we're proud to release Discourse 1.2 today! The focus of this release was performance and extensibility; here are a few highlights: Export Your Posts 0:00/1× One of the promises of Discourse is that your data belongs
  13. updates Discourse Standard Hosting Plan Now Available As of today, it's been two years since we launched Discourse as a public project! To celebrate, we're making one of our most common requests available -- a standard hosting plan. It includes the following: * The full Discourse feature set, of cou
  14. hardware Our Discourse Hosting Configuration We've talked about the Discourse server hardware before. But now let's talk about the Discourse network. In the physical and software sense, not the social sense, mmmk? How exactly do we host Discourse on our servers? Here at Discourse, we prefer to host

2014 10

  1. updates Discourse 1.1 and Release Schedule In September, the entire Discourse Team had our yearly world meetup in Toronto. It was a blast! Robin and Neil (not pictured, he has a thing with heights) hosted us and made sure a fun time was had by all in their home city. We rode segways, we climbed the
  2. updates Introducing Discourse 1.0 Today we are incrementing the version number of Discourse to 1.0. We've been working on Discourse in public for about a year and a half now – since February 2013. Turns out that's about how long it takes to herd an open source project from "
  3. culture Building a Discourse Community Sure, anyone can set up their very own Discourse in 30 minutes or less [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/]. But how do you get people to go there? I often describe Discourse as an interestin
  4. updates Discourse V1.0 Next Month In January I wrote about The Road to Discourse 1.0 [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/01/the-road-to-discourse-1-0-2/], and I mentioned that we planned to reach version 1 in "the next few months". That time has come. I&
  5. people Welcome 2014 Discourse Interns! I'm pleased to announce the Discourse team now has two interns. Arpit Jalan (@techapj) Arpit hails from Jodhpur, India [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodhpur]. We met Arpit on meta.discourse [https://meta.discourse.org/users/techapj/activity], where he produced
  6. updates Translating Discourse with Transifex In Localizing Discourse [https://blog.discourse.org/2013/03/localizing-discourse/], I noted that we leveraged the mature, built in localization support in Rails to make it easier to translate Discourse into your preferred language. To better support large
  7. install Install Discourse in Under 30 Minutes A few key things came together recently: * The official release of Discourse 1.0, with 1 GB RAM minimum support * The release [https://twitter.com/ubuntu/status/723208606695362563] of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server [http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/] previously
  8. install Discourse Installs for Non-Profit and Education As of 2017, we offer 50% discount for legally recognized non-profit organizations 85% discount for legally recognized educational institutions Just visit our signup page [https://discourse.org/buy], then contact us at team@discourse.org after s
  9. updates One Year of Discourse To celebrate our first birthday (a little late, I know) I'm pleased to announce we are now accepting signups for Discourse communities. So happy birthday! We've made tremendous headway towards version 1.0, and most of that is thanks to our first three beta partners: * H
  10. updates The Road to Discourse 1.0 Discourse launched at version 0.8.0.0 which was my off the cuff estimate of how "done" we were with our first public release on February 5th, 2013 -- about eighty percent done, I thought, once you factor in the ninety-ninety rule: The first 90 percent of

2013 20

  1. people Discourse Team Building Exercise 2013 Discourse is a distributed team on several different continents and time zones. In fact, some of us have never even met in real life. Until the Discourse Team Building Exercise 2013, that is. (Pictured from left: Robin, Régis, Neil, Sam) The whole Discour
  2. people Welcome Régis Hanol to the Discourse team The Discourse Team has always been intentionally small. We did have plans to add a team member sometime after the public launch. But we wanted just the right person, someone brave enough to take on the risk of a project as broadly ambitious as Discour
  3. design Custom Local Avatars One of the most requested features in the last few months is easily custom avatars. Although Discourse has always supported standard Internet-wide Gravatars based on the account email address, there were some long-standing concerns: * Some people simply don't like Gravata
  4. partners Our Second Partner: Boing Boing It's been a little over a month since we launched our second partner, Boing Boing [http://boingboing.net/2013/06/27/can-we-talk.html]. [http://boingboing.net/2013/06/27/can-we-talk.html]Boing Boing has a long history of experimenting with comment and discussi
  5. design Improved Image Handling Although Discourse is open source discussion software designed around the fundamental concept of paragraphs, there is no denying that in this era of pervasive broadband, online discussions are as much about images and videos now as they are about words. With Discourse,
  6. culture Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums Here's my ForumCon [http://www.forumcon.com/] 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k02ev0qzP4] -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side. Update M
  7. install Discourse on Ubuntu: Video Walkthrough > Update: These instructions are deprecated. The only officially supported installs are Docker based. Please refer to our official install guide! [https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md] Ubuntu Server [http://www.ubuntu
  8. culture Your Online Clubhouse I've gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends -- whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand. There's a big difference between a Facebook Group and having
  9. hardware The Discourse Servers When we moved to our new datacenter, I didn't elaborate on exactly what sort of hardware we have in the rack. But now I will. There are 13 servers here now, all variously numbered Tie Fighters -- derived from our internal code name for the project while it was
  10. coding Discourse as Your First Rails App Update April 4, 2018 The Discourse Vagrant development install is not longer supported and maintained. Current development install guides can be found at meta.discourse.org for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. Original Post: If you're a developer, but have never t
  11. partners Our First Partner: How-To Geek If you click the "Buy" link on Discourse, you'll find out that you can't … yet. Our immediate plan is to find three great partners willing to live on the bleeding beta edge and run forums with us, so that we can be confident we&
  12. culture Forums, As Seen On TV This brief clip from the season 7 finale of the television show 30 Rock skewers stereotypically snarky Internet forum culture. Any recs for the best place to buy a girl's bike [on the upper west side of New York City]? (She's 8) I'm sorry,
  13. swag Discourse T-Shirts and Stickers Would you like a Discourse t-shirt? [https://cottonbureau.com/products/discourse]With, perhaps, a free set of Discourse stickers included? [https://cottonbureau.com/products/discourse]Of course you would! Our friends at United Pixel Workers (now Cotton Bureau) pu
  14. culture The Importance of Meta on Forums If I learned anything at Stack Overflow, it is the importance of meta to any healthy community [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do.html] . Meta is the one dedicated area every single forum n
  15. culture The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a saf
  16. hardware The Discourse Datacenter We're in the process of migrating to a new datacenter at he.net so that we can offer world class hosting to our three launch partners. Here are a few pictures of the co-located server rack that will be the new home of Discourse. This enormous hallway
  17. updates Localizing Discourse Discourse was always intended to be a discussion platform supporting every human language. We launched one month ago supporting only English, but since we used the default Ruby on Rails i18n gem, Discourse can be (relatively) easily translated into the language of your c
  18. updates Updating Discourse It's been a little over two weeks since we launched Discourse. Our current plan is what I call swabbing the deck, spending the next month or so polishing and finalizing the features we shipped, fixing any urgent problems or bugs that are blocking folks. Just the absolute m
  19. design The Discourse Logo: A System Of Rainbows A great logo distills everything about your company and its mission into one succinct image. Getting the logo right sets the tone for everything else you'll do. That's why one of the first design elements we tried to nail down on Discourse was our logo
  20. people The Discourse Team Discourse wouldn't be what it is without the crack team we assembled. It's kind of amazing how this plan came together, but any plan is only as good as the people working on it. I'm Jeff Atwood. You may know me as the programmer