A useful question for community builders: Are you designing for content, or are you designing for connection? New episode of the Discourse podcast with Paz Pisarski on community, belonging, trust, and the hidden curriculum behind great communities! youtu.be/wwv1x3U1xr0

Community is easier to build when it solves a painful, urgent problem. Richard Millington explains why “painkiller” communities outperform “vitamin” communities:

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. blog.discourse.org/2026/05/dis...

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. blog.discourse.org/2026/05/dis...

Reddit just started blocking access to mobile users, demanding they download the app before they can keep reading. There is no “continue to site” and no way around it. It’s just a wall. We want to be clear: Discourse will never do this. Here's why 🧵 1/11

We’ve added a new “Me too” button to unsolved topics in support categories 🧵 When a member finds a topic describing an issue they’re also experiencing, they can now click “Me too” to indicate they’re impacted...

Discourse just consolidated tag management! 🧵 Every tag operation on selected topics now lives inside a single Manage Tags modal, replacing the three separate buttons that used to clutter the bulk actions menu.

Are social platforms doomed to be overrun by bots? And is the dead internet theory already inevitable? We don't think so. Discourse CEO Hawk explains why. blog.discourse.org/2026/05/the...

This is the real-world experience of the AI translation feature we shipped in 2025… Exactly what it’s like to use Discourse in another language. blog.discourse.org/2026/05/wha...

1/6 Great feature ideas die in a few places: buried in chat, lost in support tickets, drowned out by whoever emails you most, or forgotten between planning meetings. We made it easier to stop that.

Episode 3 of the Discourse podcast! We're talking to Richard Millington about community, psychology, brand and what it means to bring humans together... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cob...

This week's case study - what started as a conventional points program now operates as a community-led experience that drives ongoing engagement, connection, and long-term value... blog.discourse.org/2026/04/cas...

After 13 years of building Discourse in public, we're excited to announce: we're staying open. Discourse has always and will always be open source. Here's why. blog.discourse.org/2026/04/dis...

A GIF of Rachel from Friends doing a happy dance was duplicated 246,173 times on one Discourse site. 1.6 MB became 377 GB of backup bloat and broke a filesystem limit. Turns out Jennifer Aniston can stress-test infrastructure: blog.discourse.org/2026/04/how...

1/7 Discourse's embed system has let you show forum comments on your blog for years. One catch: it was read-only. Visitors could see the discussion but had to click through to your Discourse site to actually participate. That just changed...

Our new website is a Webby Honoree for 2025! We're incredibly proud of the design team at Discourse and the hard work they've put into this. #webbys

If you're a history buff, this is the blog post for you. We cover how multilingual support at Discourse evolved over 13 years - with some honest behind the scenes! blog.discourse.org/2026/03/bui...

Just shipped a feature we're proud of for Discourse - solved schema markup for solution posts. Here's what we did and why it matters for SEO 🧵

New on YouTube: our co-CEO Hawk on the state of online communities. We dig into what's going wrong with digital spaces, how the attention economy shapes community culture, and why open source infrastructure matters for community builders: youtu.be/h0SibWF04Io

1/6 We just made it way easier to set up support / Q&A categories on Discourse. New category type, smarter defaults, less configuration. Here’s what we’ve changed 🧵

Our latest Discourse Discover roundup is live! 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... blog.discourse.org/2026/03/dis...

1/ New improvements just shipped in Discourse. Here’s what’s changed this round…

Keegan from Discourse tells you literally everything you need to build your community... Learn the exact setup: categories, AI tools, moderation, trust levels, and chat in 8 minutes. Whether you're starting a community or scaling one, this covers it. youtu.be/5daZ_eSVGGA

A strong moderator program is one of the most powerful ways to scale a healthy community. We'll walk you through exactly how to design a program that fits your community’s size, culture, and goals, and how to support moderators so they stay engaged long-term: zoom.us/webinar/reg...

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. blog.discourse.org/2026/03/how...

We started a podcast. First guest is Sam Saffron who co-founded Discourse because he believed in the power of online communities. We talked about what AI actually changes in an engineering team, how it unlocks moderation at scale and why trust is paramount... youtu.be/VrP2oP6LvWI

Take a look behind the scenes! Here's 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... blog.discourse.org/2026/03/how...

What does it look like to replace social media with forums? We're finding out... www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Di...

The short version of what we believe at Discourse: a community’s language should not be the factor that stops someone from participating in a community... blog.discourse.org/2026/03/eve...

New from Discourse... This month, we're launching the Discourse Podcast with tech writer JA Westenberg! We'll be talking with the leading voices in community about the state of the internet, coordinating humans and how we get from here to a better web. More soon.

Discourse offers 3 AI deployment paths: BYO API key, Managed AI + Self-hosted models One-size AI ages badly. Optionality wins. blog.discourse.org/2026/03/thr...

What happens when you swap the scroll for something slower? Keegan from Discourse spent a week off algorithmic social media. No Twitter/X, no Instagram, no TikTok, no LinkedIn feed... www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Di...

What happens when you swap the scroll for something slower? Keegan from Discourse spent a week off algorithmic social media. No Twitter/X, no Instagram, no TikTok, no LinkedIn feed. Instead, he redirected that time to community spaces... youtu.be/6DijCrwXmuo

Most feature request systems are where ideas go to die. Elfsight built theirs differently - public voting, status tracking, and developer KPIs tied to community-requested releases, all running on Discourse. The result: 700 features shipped so far. blog.discourse.org/2026/02/elf...

Category creation on Discourse just got a lot simpler. Fewer fields, better color picker + straightforward access controls. Advanced settings are still available when you need them. Enable in your admin panel under Upcoming Changes! meta.discourse.org/t/simplifie...

For 5 years, our YAML automation was destroying comments. We sponsored psych-pure to fix it - and now Ruby can preserve comments during programmatic edits. blog.discourse.org/2026/02/how...

Make outgrew their Facebook community. The fix: move to Discourse and turn scattered conversations into a searchable knowledge hub that works long after the conversation ends… blog.discourse.org/2026/02/mak...

We’re increasing the AI credits on Discourse Free. If you've been rationing summarizations or second-guessing whether to use AI search on a thread, that calculation just changed. We’re giving communities more room to actually use the tools the way they're meant to be used. 🧵

If everything important is locked in Slack threads and one-on-one chats, your models are guessing in the dark. A Discourse forum turns scattered Q&A into structured, searchable memory: blog.discourse.org/2026/02/you...

1/ In Q+A categories that use the Solved plugin, we’ve shipped a small but impactful improvement to the Solved experience in Discourse, and it now comes with a little more joy 🎉

Discourse = community-owned infrastructure. 100% free & open source, GPL v2, export-all-your-data, self-host anywhere, and extend it however you like. If you care about sovereignty, transparency, and longevity for your community, start with Discourse: discourse.org/open-source

Most online “communities” are actually two very different things: 1. Libraries – knowledge bases where people arrive through a search, get an answer, and leave. 2. Cafes – smaller spaces where the value is human connection. Know which one you’re building… blog.discourse.org/2026/01/bef...

1/ Admin UX matters more than we admit. We’re working on a small but powerful improvement: making it much easier for admins to create and manage categories directly from the navigation menu. Here’s what we've been up to 👇

Addictive design kills communities. Burnout, performative posting, anxiety-driven engagement, and eventual abandonment become the pattern. The best community PMs know that sustainable participation beats frantic activity. blog.discourse.org/2026/01/the...

"Community everywhere" sounds smart until the platforms change their API, get acquired, or shut down. Remember: it’s only your home if you hold the keys. blog.discourse.org/2026/01/dat...

Ever wish you could "spread" arguments to an Ember component? At #EmberFest 2025, David Taylor shared how we solved this challenge for the Discourse plugin system. Watch the lightning talk here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=osi...

AI search can only be as good as its sources - and structured forum discussions beat ephemeral chat every time. New post on why the deeper web might be exactly what the new web needs… blog.discourse.org/2026/01/the...

AI can produce plausible code faster than you can read it. But "plausible" isn't the same as "correct." Here's Discourse dev Martin Brennan on how to survive as an engineer in the age of LLMs: blog.discourse.org/2026/01/ai-...

That’s a wrap on 2025! 👋 This year we focused heavily on making Discourse more accessible and powerful. We want everyone to have a place of their own for conversations that matter. Thank you for building with us. Read our full recap and see what’s coming in 2026: blog.discourse.org/2025/12/202...

December's Discourse Discover theme: Linux communities! Framework, Fedora, and Ubuntu are building knowledge bases where hardware tinkerers and open source contributors find the answers and the connections they need: blog.discourse.org/2025/12/dis...