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 Hub mobile app. Additionally, the new Hot topic list surfaces trending topics so your members can keep up with the most popular conversations in your community.
Discourse AI now supports configuring personas with additional knowledge from documents and APIs, and supports a growing number of large language models. We’ve also added integrations with chat and automation scripts for triage and periodic reporting.
To streamline community setup, we’ve added a new admin sidebar to simplify navigation and dedicated configuration pages for features like custom flags and Discourse AI to make it easier to complete related tasks.
Improvements to the signup process, bookmarks, reminders, chat, and the mobile interface further improve the user experience for all members and visitors to your community.
Read on for details on all the new features and updates!
More discoverable conversations and communities
Help people find trending conversations with Hot topic sorting
When your community is buzzing (which is awesome!), it can be challenging for members to find the most active discussions. The new Hot sorting option ranks topics based on recency and member engagement so that anyone can easily find and join the most popular conversations in your community.
Help people find your community with Discourse Discover
We launched Discourse Discover to make finding communities that are using Discourse easier!
With over 20,000 instances of Discourse out in the wild, our goal is to help more people find communities they want to join and participate in. Discover is also integrated into the Discourse Hub mobile app to make finding and joining communities even easier.
Community administrators can enable the site setting to opt-in, and if it meets our criteria we’ll list it in Discourse Discover. Every day, more and more communities are joining!
Spread the word with Powered by Discourse
To promote awareness of Discourse, communities can now display a “Powered by Discourse” badge at the bottom of their site, enabling users to learn more about our open source community discussion platform and the community around it.
Automate triage and reporting with AI assistance
Discourse Automation now includes built-in scripts that enable you to perform tasks using AI when new posts or topics are created, or on a periodic basis.
Automatic triage of posts and topics
The triage posts automation script allows you to automatically tag or categorize topics based on their content, as well as to automatically reply or hide content and send it to review for moderation.
Periodic summaries and reporting
The periodic report script allows you to have AI run periodic reports of specified content with a custom prompt and post a summary in a topic of your choice. This can be especially helpful if you have a busy forum and need to keep different groups within your team informed about different aspects of the discussions taking place within your community.
More powerful AI personas
In this release, we’ve focused on making AI integrations more powerful while making it easier to configure the growing number of tools and options.
We’ve added a dedicated page for configuring AI integrations, which have gotten significantly more flexible and powerful with dedicated tabs for related site settings, a growing number of large language model (LLM) providers, and AI bot personas, which have a number of new features.
Augment personas with uploaded documents and custom tools
You can make more knowledgeable AI personas by uploading your own content as files and extending their capabilities with custom tools to retrieve and transform content from specific websites or APIs.
Chat with AI bot in channels and direct messages
In addition to long form personal messages, you can now chat with AI bot personas in channels and direct messages. Personas can also be configured to be mentionable, and will respond in a new thread in direct messages or wherever threading is enabled.
Stay compliant with custom flags and required user fields
We’ve added new features to enable site administrators to stay compliant with external policies. These updates include custom flags for moderation, and the ability to add new required user fields, for example, when your terms of service are updated.
Custom flags for moderation
The review system in Discourse has always made it easy for you to let your community help you manage discussions, root out spam and illegal content, and resolve other issues. The defaults are still best in class and you don't need to change them, but given the increasing importance of protecting personally identifiable information online and new data protection regulations in many parts of the world, you will appreciate having the ability to tailor the flags to your needs.
Required user fields for existing users
It's always been possible to create user fields that your members can complete at signup or when editing their user profile. Now you can create and manage user fields that your existing members are required to complete before being allowed back into your site. This is especially handy when you need everyone in your community to agree to updated terms of service!
Easier site configuration and management
We're making it easier to set up, launch, and manage communities using Discourse with a new sidebar in the admin interface, and dedicated configuration pages for features like AI and custom flags.
New admin sidebar for easier navigation
The biggest change you will notice right away is that we have introduced a new admin sidebar. We have organized everything admins and moderators need to be able to do into collapsible sections and put them right at your fingertips, with a handy filter at the top to help you drill down. Our goal is to make your workflow smoother and more efficient, helping you stay on top of your community management tasks.
Dedicated configuration pages
We are starting to introduce dedicated configuration pages for features throughout the admin interface to make it easier to find and configure related settings in one place. There are now dedicated configuration pages for AI and the new custom flags feature, with more on the way.
Better validation for site settings
We’ve made it simpler and less error-prone to specify file sizes and date ranges in site settings, as part of our ongoing quality of life improvements for community administrators.
Silently close topics and other bulk topic actions
Bulk actions have gotten better with a redesign and some enhancements. One major highlight is the ability to clean up topics that don’t require extra attention. Now, you can close several topics at once without bumping them. Additionally, you can leave a note that will be recorded in a small action post to provide context. This will reduce notification noise and keep your community focused on important conversations.
Other enhancements to the everyday experience
We’re continuing to invest in Discourse’s member experience to ensure members enjoy spending time in your community.
Straightforward signup for new members
When new members discover your community, we want to make it simple for them to join in the conversation.
We’ve started improving the signup process for new members by adding clear and concise feedback as users fill out each field on the signup form. This will make it easier for members to complete signup and start participating in your community sooner.
Quicker access to topic information
The topic map has been redesigned to give all users quicker access to information about a topic and appears at the beginning and end of longer discussions. It shows at a glance who has been participating most in the conversation and how many views the topics has had recently. It also offers quick access to summarize an entire discussion with Discourse AI.
Faster bookmarks and reminders
We’ve redesigned the bookmark menu to be even more intuitive. You can now add a bookmark with a single click and easily set a reminder, too, so you won’t forget to read up on that important topic.
Enhanced event integrations
It’s easier than ever for members to join community events! Discourse Events can now pass video call links and topic URLs into Google Calendar and iCal.
Caption images automatically for better search and accessibility
You can now allow users to have AI add an editable caption when they upload an image to your forum. Users can opt-in to do this automatically, and are always able to edit the caption themselves. This helps to optimize discoverability of content via search and while enhancing accessibility.
Developing with Discourse
We're always striving to make Discourse easier to customize with themes and plugins. Our latest updates focus on improving flexibility for theme settings and maintaining compatibility as we modernize the platform.
More flexible theme settings
Themes and theme components can now take advantage of a new, flexible object type for settings. The new object type setting allows for a custom schema to be defined by the extension developer, similar to the earlier JSON schema type, but is simpler to define, and provides a much better user experience for admins configuring the component on their own site.
Keeping themes and plugins compatible as we improve the platform
With the earlier upgrade to Ember 5, we’ve now completely dropped support for Ember 3 and are continuing to modernize the entire front end application. We will continue to share instructions for extension developers for how to stay compatible in our community as we introduce deprecations for features we plan to remove, and when a site is using a deprecated platform feature, a notice will appear for site admins with a link to these instructions.
🚢 Updates to Official Hosting
As a customer on our hosting, you can now upgrade plans instantly from your /admin dashboard or /plugins page, giving you access to more plugins, staff users, and other features to meet the unique needs of your community.
📝 Full Changelog
We have packed every Discourse release with useful enhancements and new features, 3.3 is no exception. Check out the release-notes tag to get a detailed account of changes in every beta leading up to this release – or see the full release notes.
Update to the latest (in one click as usual 😉)
If you are on our hosting, you’re already on 3.3! Otherwise, updating is as easy as clicking the update button linked from your Discourse admin page or by following the email we send reminding you to do so.
As a part of our security policy, we run a public exploit bounty program at Hacker One to strengthen our goal to make every Discourse site secure by default. If any security issues are reported to us, we prioritize them and investigate thoroughly.
If you’ve made it this far and still don’t have a Discourse, why not? Install it yourself in under 30 minutes, or start one for free,
Thank You for a Decade of Discourse 🙏
It's been almost 10 years since version 1.0 in 2014. Over the past decade, Discourse has evolved into a powerful and versatile platform, thanks to the invaluable feedback and support from our community, but we’re still just getting started. There are so many more exciting features and improvements we can’t wait to bring to you!
We’d like to thank our customers. It’s with your support that Discourse remains an open-source platform available for everyone to use. We're honored that you choose us to be the online home for your community.
Discourse relies on (awesome) outside contributors to be a healthy, functioning open-source project! Our sincerest thanks for code contributions in this release from:
angusmcleod, AndrewPrigorshnev, moin-Jana, Arkshine, merefield, gormus, pangbo13, pfaffman, nolosb, GuteLaune, nathan-nz, codez, Gravitonic, turtlestackdev, tsubery, theCrius, t1-tracey, su1gen, sobstel, simpl1g, rcsheets, oozzal, n-rodriguez, mitkolazov, misaka4e21, mikeyboysan, martinramirez7, kvognar, kbrock, jermanuts, jacobtread, ganncamp, fokx, fe80, evgeni, ember-tomster, dsims, devhaozi, danrmiller, dangerousbeans, communiteq, codethulu, caveman99, carehabit, booleanbetrayal, attalbialami, anmorgunov, alongdate, Subramanya-Murugesan, ScottMastro, MarcRez33, Juanc1to, Firepup6500, ChrisPelatari, Canapin
Huge thanks to our translators who generously contributed their time, effort and love to translate Discourse into numerous languages for this release. We pay professional translators on top of volunteer efforts to make sure all our translations are of the highest quality and that Discourse is more accessible with every step forward.
To see what’s coming for future versions of Discourse, visit the releases category. Till next time 👋