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 believe that’s the case.
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
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 special.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 their needs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 hold the keys.
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.
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?
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.
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 yourself. Their laptops work beautifully with Linux, and they'
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.
