Unpacking Discourse 3.4

Here at Discourse, we’re always striving to make community management easier. That’s why Discourse 3.4 has introduced a more consistent admin experience, a simplified signup and login flow, mobile app improvements, and AI-powered tools to fight spam and help manage your community.

Beyond product improvements, we’ve integrated Discourse Discover into our mobile app to make it easier for members to find and join new communities. We’ve also launched a new entry-level hosting plan to reduce barriers to creating a community.

Keep reading for all the details!

A smarter, healthier community

Spam detection in one click

Fighting spam can be frustrating and time-consuming. Our new spam detector automatically flags spam for review via an improved queue, ensuring a smooth moderation process. Hosted customers can enable effortless spam detection with a single click, powered by a Discourse-hosted large language model (LLM).

Better sentiment insights

We’ve improved our Sentiment feature to help you better understand your members' mood. With improved charts and explanations, you’ll gain better insights into the topics driving emotions in your members and how to respond effectively.

AI for all

We’ve seen how valuable AI can be for managing online spaces, so we’ve made Discourse AI available to all customers on our hosting. Everything you need is built right in—no third-party integrations required. Whether it’s identifying spam, summarizing topics, or analyzing sentiment, Discourse AI is designed to make community management more efficient.

Just ask Discourse

Finding the right answers to your Discourse-related questions just got easier with Ask Discourse. Whether you're troubleshooting or exploring new features, our AI-powered help center provides the answers you need, saving you time and effort. Now you can focus more time on your community and less time searching for solutions.

Easier site management

A consistent admin interface

A better admin experience means a smoother workflow. We’ve redesigned the admin area to be more intuitive, making it easier to find and manage settings. With a cleaner layout and improved navigation, you’ll spend less time clicking around and more time engaging with your users.

Simplified invites

Inviting new members is faster and easier with our simplified invite links. Basic link invites that cover most of your needs are now just a click away. Additional customizations and email options are still available when you need them, so you can choose the option that works best for your needs.

New About page

We’ve refreshed and expanded the About page to feature key statistics and important points of contact so visitors and members can learn about your site.

Revamped community traffic reports

Understanding where your traffic comes from helps you make informed decisions about ongoing growth. We have updated our pageview reporting to provide more reliable and actionable data about site traffic, including the detection of browser or crawler traffic.

Better member experience

Simpler signup and login 

When a new member discovers your community, joining should be easy. That’s why we’ve redesigned the signup and login process with mobile-friendly fullscreen pages and progress bars so joining is simple and fast. We’re working to roll out fullscreen signup and login pages to all Discourse communities, but you can switch to these new designs today.

Support for multiple drafts

You'll never need to discard another draft. When you need to take a break or switch projects, you can now easily save as many draft topics and replies as needed. Your drafts are easily accessible in the sidebar, the New Topic button drop-down, or from your Activity feed.

Improved mobile experience

We’ve enhanced the Discourse mobile experience by improving mobile menus, navigation, and overall design so you can access and participate in conversations in whatever way suits you best. 

Smarter chat notifications

Chat conversations can move fast, but we want to help you stay connected to conversations that matter. The following improvements make chat notifications more reliable and customizable for you and your members:

• Simplified notification preferences, so you can pick the notification style that works best for you
• Smarter, more reliable push notifications for desktop and mobile
• The ability to "watch" specific chat threads so you can closely follow important conversations 

Threaded conversations in direct messages

Using threads in your group chats and direct messages can help keep conversations organized, especially in fast-paced chats. Threads also make it easy for others to find and catch up on interesting conversations they might have missed, giving shared ideas and insights more long-term value. 

A fresh new font 

We’ve updated our default font to Inter for a modern look and improved readability in new communities. Existing sites with the previous default will not be changed, and admins can update their community’s font choice at any time in the appearance settings.

DiscourseHub app updates

Discover new communities

The Discover tab features 700+ Discourse communities to explore and join. Whether you’re looking to discover new interests, connect with like-minded individuals, or share your unique stories, Discourse Discover helps you find them.

Quick access to hot topics and chat

It’s now easier to stay up-to-date with conversations that matter most in your favorite communities. You can preview hot topics and chat from public communities added to your app home screen. Staying engaged in trending conversations is now more convenient than ever.

Easy plan upgrades and account setup

Instant plan upgrades

You can now upgrade your plan anytime, giving you flexibility as your community grows and expands. Plan upgrades are instant and prorated.

Introducing the Starter plan

The Starter plan ($20/mo) is a fast, affordable way to launch a community using Discourse’s official hosting. It’s perfect for getting started without compromising core features.

Better setup for new sites

Getting started with Discourse is now simpler and more intuitive. We’ve refined the setup wizard with clearer options, improved step order, and a preview pane that makes configuring your site design a breeze.

Developing with Discourse

We've continued to improve the developer experience and customization APIs for Discourse core, themes, and plugins. New implementations for the post-menu and topic-list come with more powerful and robust customization APIs while providing a safe upgrade path for existing themes and plugins.

Our icon set has been updated to Font Awesome 6, which provides a wide array of new icons and more consistent naming. Other behind-the-scenes dependency updates include Rails 7.2, Ember 5.12, and Postgres 15.

We've introduced a new Discourse Developer Toolbar to provide quick access to Plugin Outlet information, safe mode, and verbose localization. We also have a new recommended strategy for developing Discourse locally using the open Dev Container standard.

📝 Full Changelog

Curious about all the enhancements and new features? Check out the release notes for a detailed breakdown of every change introduced in the betas leading up to this release, or see the full changelog for this update.

Update to the latest — in just one click, as usual 

If you are on our hosting, you’re already on 3.4! Otherwise, updating is as easy as clicking the update button linked from your Discourse admin page or following the reminder email we send. 

As part of our security policy, we run a public exploit bounty program at HackerOne to strengthen our goal to make every Discourse site secure by default. If any security issues are reported to us, we prioritize and investigate them thoroughly. 

🙏 Thank you contributors

We always like to conclude by thanking those who make Discourse an awesome open-source project. Many thanks for all the code contributions in this release from:

angusmcleod, Lhcfl, moin-Jana, merefield, nvh0412, tvavrda, pfaffman, overgrown, ermolaev, communiteq, the-spectator, pgcd, gormus, Arkshine, zlmarshall, wozulong, thoka, shuaib-swzd, pabgan, nta, nolosb, mr-c, jyuvaraj03, jeremy0519, geckolinux, elmuerte, dmke, djlambert, dimitrianoudi, dhoelzgen, cheungtitus, benoitdesnoyers, balazsorban44, adam-skalicky, Tealk, NateDhaliwal, MelaineGerard, Gullumluvl

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.

We hope you enjoyed our roundup of Release 3.4! If you want to learn more, check out our current projects to see what we are working on. 

See you in the next version of Discourse 👋.