updates

Updating Discourse

Jeff Atwood

• 2 min read

It's been a little over two weeks since we launched Discourse.

what do we want? respectful 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 minimum possible new feature work.

Since February 5th, we've stomped on a bunch of bugs and reached our first basic milestone — we have active version number checking on the admin page. We also link to the GitHub revision that this version was generated from, so you'll know what changes are in the version you have installed.

Version 0.8.2 is the first "official" beta release of Discourse and we STRONGLY urge every Discourse forum instance to upgrade as soon as possible. We marked it as a critical update, because it does contain serious exploit fixes for what was released on day one.

There are a handful of early Discourse forums, and we applaud the initiative! But do bear in mind that this is very, very early in the lifecycle of the Discourse project – and bleeding edge, broken beta pain is to be expected at this point.

If you are experimenting with Discourse, it is absolutely critical that you stay in sync with us and update your forum to the latest GitHub version regularly. Now, every time you visit the admin pages on your Discourse forum, you'll get a reminder about your version, and a more urgent warning if we've pushed any critical releases out. We'll continue to improve this page as we go, but this is the minimum viable version checking we need everyone to be on.

One of the key metrics we use to decide if Discourse is working is the number of open source contributions we get. And even in this initial two week period, it's encouraging to see that we have 50 contributors already!

Thank you very much, and keep those pull requests coming!

We're very fond of contributors, and if you regularly contribute pull requests to Discourse you may find that … nice things happen to you. I can say no more!

How can we make it even easier to contribute to Discourse? We already switched from CoffeeScript to plain old JavaScript based on community feedback. If there are any other ways we can make life simpler for contributors, or early bleeding edge installs, please don't hesitate to tell us on meta.discourse.org.