Blog

culture

A collection of 19 posts

Driving Continuous Improvement at Scale

Back in 2013, Discourse launched with Rails 3 and Ember 1.0. Over the years, we’ve evolved alongside those frameworks and our many other dependencies - taking full advantage of new features, performance improvements, and modern best practices as they’ve arrived. For more than a decade, we’ve

community management

Dealing with Toxicity in Online Communities

Online communities are places where people should be able to come together to share ideas and learn from each other in an environment that is safe and enjoyable to participate in. In healthy communities, members follow established guidelines and norms to create a culture of collaboration and mutual support. Occasionally

The Home Office Desks of Discourse

A few of our teammates have (graciously) agreed to share a glimpse into their home workspaces, including the gear and elements of the space itself they love.

Building an Emotionally Sustainable Company

In many ways, our company seemed well-positioned for the COVID-19 pandemic. We'd already been a 100% remote company, spread across many time zones and countries. We'd learned to use tools (like Discourse!) asynchronously to communicate and work effectively. When push came to shove, though, it didn&

Launching a Successful Discourse Community

While we've offered general tips for building a Discourse community [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/08/building-a-discourse-community/] , we also get a lot of questions about what specifically you can do to help launch a successful Discourse community. What is the "elevator pitch" for your community? The

Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

Originally published June 2018 by Jeff Atwood. Updated December 2025. 💡This post has remained one of our most-visited resources for good reason: trust levels form the foundation of how Discourse communities scale healthy participation. While the core philosophy stays constant, we've made improvements to how communities can apply

Discourse in Outreachy Summer 2018

tl;dr: Discourse will be participating in Outreachy Summer. If you are eligible to participate in this internship, please consider applying [https://www.outreachy.org/2018-may-august/communities/discourse/#testing]! About Outreachy Participants of Outreachy work with an open source organization (in our case Discourse) on a 3 month programming project.

The Discourse Encouragement Fund

For almost a year now, we’ve been doing something that’s considered quite risky [http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html] for an open source project: Paying contributors. Communities like ours are fundamentally built on intrinsic motivation [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-vast-and-endless-sea/]. Getting money involved can jeopardize the whole

Discourse New User Tips and Tricks

Originally published December 2016 by Jeff Atwood. Updated December 2025. 💡These practical techniques help community managers work smarter, not harder. Discourse has evolved significantly since this post was first published in 2016, adding new tools and capabilities that make many of these tasks even easier. This updated guide covers essential

The ideal GSoC applicant

This is our first year participating in Google Summer of Code. In short, if you're a student with some Rails & Ember skills, you should check out our GSoC profile [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5787017325576192/] and consider applying for a chance to do paid work on Discourse

A Year in Discourse - Recap of 2015

Discourse is a large open source project [https://github.com/discourse/discourse] buzzing with activity, so a lot of cool things happen over the course of a year. Let's look back at 2015 and pick out some highlights. Our Most Popular Topic of 2015 The most viewed topic

Choice of Games and Discourse

We don't consider Discourse successful unless the communities using Discourse are thriving and growing. And no community we host has thrived quite like Choice of Games [https://www.choiceofgames.com]. Their Discourse has absolutely exploded over the last year, to the point that they are now the 22nd

OpenROV and Discourse

We measure Discourse's success as an open source project by one simple metric: are Discourse communities working? Is your community working? We recently interviewed Brian Adams [http://badevguru.ghost.io/] of OpenROV to discuss how they use Discourse and get some specifics about what is – and isn'

Building a Discourse Community

Sure, anyone can set up their very own Discourse in 30 minutes or less [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/]. But how do you get people to go there? I often describe Discourse as an interesting dinner party. Think of categories as rooms, topics as tables, replies as conversations.

Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums

Here's my ForumCon [http://www.forumcon.com/] 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k02ev0qzP4] -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side. Update March 2022: Unfortunately the

Your Online Clubhouse

I've gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends -- whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand. There's a big difference between a Facebook Group and

Forums, As Seen On TV

This brief clip from the season 7 finale of the television show 30 Rock skewers stereotypically snarky Internet forum culture. Any recs for the best place to buy a girl's bike [on the upper west side of New York City]? (She's 8) I'm sorry,

The Importance of Meta on Forums

If I learned anything at Stack Overflow, it is the importance of meta to any healthy community [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do.html] . Meta is the one dedicated area every single forum needs, no matter its size, no matter how obscure it is, regardless how many posts

The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse

With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a safe, simple default set of guidelines for civilized discourse. Today&