Discourse
@discourse.org
📤 174
📥 4
📝 197
http://discourse.org
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
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The Hidden Curriculum of Community Building: Connection First
What does it really take to build a community where people feel like they belong?In this episode, JA speaks with Paz Pisarski about the hidden curriculum of ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwv1x3U1xr0
1 day ago
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Community is easier to build when it solves a painful, urgent problem. Richard Millington explains why “painkiller” communities outperform “vitamin” communities:
4 days ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/discourse-is-agent-ready-heres-how/
6 days ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/discourse-will-never-block-you-from-the-web/
7 days ago
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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
8 days ago
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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...
8 days ago
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Discourse just consolidated tag management! đź§µ 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.
13 days ago
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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...
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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 believe that’s the case.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/the-digg-lesson-why-moderation-infrastructure-matters/
20 days ago
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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...
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What It's Actually Like to Use Discourse in Another Language
The real-world experience of the AI translation feature we shipped in 2025
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/what-its-actually-like-to-use-discourse-in-another-language/
23 days ago
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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.
about 1 month ago
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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...
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Discourse
Richard Millington on Community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CobPX1Sra0s
about 1 month ago
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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...
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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
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/case-stuhow-we-gave-brand-loyalty-a-community/
about 1 month ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/discourse-is-not-going-closed-source/
about 1 month ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/how-jennifer-aniston-and-friends-cost-us-377gb-and-broke-ext4-hardlinks/
about 2 months ago
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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...
about 2 months ago
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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
about 2 months ago
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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...
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Building for Every Language
The second post in the Discourse Without Borders series.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/building-for-every-language/
about 2 months ago
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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 đź§µ
about 2 months ago
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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
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Why Online Communities Keep Falling Apart (And How to Fix Them)
What does it take to build an online community that actually lasts? In this conversation, I sit down with Hawk to talk about the evolution of digital communi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0SibWF04Io
2 months ago
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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 🧵
2 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/discourse-discover-communities-where-builders-learn-together/
2 months ago
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1/ New improvements just shipped in Discourse. Here’s what’s changed this round…
2 months ago
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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
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The Complete Guide to Building Your Online Community
Discourse: The Complete Guide to Building Your Online CommunityEverything you need to know to get started with Discourse — the open-source community platform...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5daZ_eSVGGA
2 months ago
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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...
2 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/how-discourse-is-becoming-a-community-of-writers/
2 months ago
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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
3 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/how-we-built-the-upcoming-changes-system-for-gradual-product-rollouts-in-discourse/
3 months ago
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What does it look like to replace social media with forums? We're finding out...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Di...
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A Week off the Feed (With Discourse)
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 Ti...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DijCrwXmuo
3 months ago
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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...
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Every Language is Welcome
A first post in the Discourse Without Borders series.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/every-language-is-welcome/
3 months ago
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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.
3 months ago
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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...
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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 their needs.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/three-ways-to-deploy-ai-in-community-platforms-and-why-choice-matters/
3 months ago
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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...
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A Week off the Feed (With Discourse)
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 Ti...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DijCrwXmuo
3 months ago
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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
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A Week off the Feed (With Discourse)
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 Ti...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DijCrwXmuo
3 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/elfsight-how-a-wishlist-category-shaped-700-feature-releases/
3 months ago
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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...
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Simplified category setup
Whether you’re new to Discourse or looking to expand your existing community, we want to make it easy for you to create categories to support meaningful conversation. To that end, we’re introducing a significant improvement to the category creation process, which should make this process easier for most use cases, while still allowing for more advanced configuration where required. In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this simplified system today. ...
https://meta.discourse.org/t/simplified-category-setup/394971
3 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/how-we-fixed-yaml-comment-preservation-in-ruby-and-why-we-sponsored-it/
3 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/make-building-a-community-powered-knowledge-hub-with-discourse/
3 months ago
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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. 🧵
3 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/your-community-as-your-ai-knowledge-layer/
4 months ago
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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 🎉
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4 months ago
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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
4 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/01/before-you-build-a-community-decide-library-or-coffee-shop/
4 months ago
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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 👇
4 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/01/the-product-managers-guide-to-non-addictive-design/
4 months ago
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"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...
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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 hold the keys.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/01/data-portability-is-table-stakes-for-community-builders-in-the-age-of-ai/
4 months ago
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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...
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Lightning Talk - EmberFest 2025 - David Taylor
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osi2P5Kvqfg&list=PLN4SpDLOSVkQpV5RHVD8jswcne8Mi7hM6
4 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/01/the-ai-search-revolutions-hidden-dependency/
4 months ago
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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-...
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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?
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/01/ai-can-code-but-it-doesnt-care-about-quality/
5 months ago
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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...
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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.
https://blog.discourse.org/2025/12/2025-our-year-in-review/
5 months ago
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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...
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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 yourself. Their laptops work beautifully with Linux, and they've built a community
https://blog.discourse.org/2025/12/discourse-discover-linux-communities/
6 months ago
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