culture

While we've offered general tips for 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 very first thing people will ask -- what is this place?

The user trust system is a fundamental cornerstone of Discourse. Trust levels are a way of… Sandboxing new users in your community so that they cannot accidentally hurt themselves, or other users while they are learning what to do.Granting experienced users more rights over time, so that they can

tl;dr: Discourse will be participating in Outreachy Summer. If you are eligible to participate in this internship, please consider applying! About OutreachyParticipants of Outreachy work with an open source organization (in our case Discourse) on a 3 month programming project. It’s similar to events like Google Summer of

For almost a year now, we’ve been doing something that’s considered quite risky for an open source project: Paying contributors. Communities like ours are fundamentally built on intrinsic motivation. Getting money involved can jeopardize the whole ecosystem, but for the past year we’ve been experimenting with a

Getting going in an online community can be overwhelming, especially if you've never used the platform before. If you're new to Discourse, here are a few quick tips and tricks to get you started: ReadingSelecting a title from the topic list will always take you to your last read post

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 and consider applying for a chance to do paid work on Discourse under the mentorship of the core team this

Discourse is a large open source project 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 2015The most viewed topic of the year was The State of JavaScript

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with customers, our latest is with John Mardlin who helps traders, devs and humans use bitcoin at Coinbase — partly through their Discourse-powered community.coinbase.com. What is Coinbase?Coinbase’s mission is to make bitcoin accessible for normal people. Our core product

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. Their Discourse has absolutely exploded over the last year, to the point that they are now the 22nd largest Discourse instance that we know

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 of OpenROV to discuss how they use Discourse and get some specifics about what is – and isn't – working for their community. What is OpenROV?

Sure, anyone can set up their very own Discourse in 30 minutes or less. 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. Your goal, as the dinner party organizer,

Here's my ForumCon 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side. Update March 2022: Unfortunately the video in this post has been marked private and is no longer available. Forums Are

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 having your own clubhouse.

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, what's a "girl's" bike? Is that

If I learned anything at Stack Overflow, it is the importance of meta to any healthy community. Meta is the one dedicated area every single forum needs, no matter its size, no matter how obscure it is, regardless how many posts per day arrive. Every forum needs a place to

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's