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We’ve updated the terminology in Discourse’s interface to improve consistency across the platform. What was previously called a “color scheme” is now referred to as a “color palette” throughout the user interface. What’s Changed The term “color scheme” has been replaced with “color palette” across the Discourse interface. This change affects what you’ll see in the admin area, customization settings, and other UI elements. The functionality remains exactly the same - only the terminology has changed. What to Expect If you’re writing documentation or guides about Discourse, please use “color palette” going forward. You may still see references to “color scheme” in some …

On Thursday, August 29, 2024 4:00 AM UTC, we hosted the Community Manager Mindset office hours with the Discourse Customer Success team, where we discussed: Developing your mindset as a Community Manager. Approaching the Community Manager role. The truth behind benchmarks and KPIs. Plus, we answered your submitted questions! Replay Office Hours: Community Manager Mindset & Resources Introductions These office hours were hosted by @jenny, @bas, and @danielle from the Discourse Customer Success team. The information shared is based on our in-depth experience with a variety of communities and not necessarily a top-down dissemination of strategies from Discourse as…

Current Projects - December 2024 Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. (We missed November, but we’re back and still aiming to do these every month). Your questions and feedback are welcome! Kicking off Support for multiple drafts Currently, Discourse only supports one topic draft at a time. We’re starting a project to remove this limitation so that you can have multiple drafts going at once. This change will make it easier to write in Discourse, since you won’t have to worry about completing an entire topic in one go or composing your work in another tool first. Admin config pages for site appearance We’v…

Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. Your questions and feedback are welcome! Kicking off Review queue improvements We are kicking off a project to make moderation easier by revamping the review queue. This will start with incremental updates to the existing moderation interface as we work toward a new, user-friendly layout for moderators. AI-powered translations We recently started working on a project to add integrations between the Discourse Translator plugin and Discourse AI to enable Discourse sites to automatically translate all topics to a user’s preferred language. Default AI spam detector The on…

Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. Your questions and feedback are welcome! Kicking off Admin config pages for site appearance We’re just about to shift from design to development on some of the improvements we’ve been designing in areas related to site appearance to make it easier for admins to configure the look and feel of their sites. Our current plans include adding support for dark mode and light mode into individual color palettes, having each theme own its own color palette, and update pages for choosing and configuring themes and components. We’re also working on a new branding page focused on a…

Welcome to our first edition of Current Projects, a new monthly newsletter where we’ll be sharing what we’re currently working on at Discourse. Our goal is to give you and the wider community some insight into what might be coming next in Discourse so you can stay informed, ask questions, share feedback, and contribute to what’s currently in progress. Without further ado, here’s what we’re currently up to! Kicking off Composer redesign We are kicking off a new project to redesign the composer for writing topics and posts. We are still in the early research, design, and prototyping phases of this project, but will be sharing more soon with the community as we make furt…

The Dark/Light Mode Toggle theme component, which adds a toggle to allow users to easily switch between light and dark modes, has been merged into Discourse core and it can be enabled via the interface color selector site setting. In addition to various bug fixes and improvements, the core version differs slightly from the original theme component in that it has a third “Auto” option which makes the site’s color mode match the system preference of the user’s device. The color selector can be configured via the interface color selector site setting to appear either in the site header next to the search icon, or in the sidebar footer. Here’s a screenshot when it’s in the…

Starting today, we will be removing the Discourse Akismet plugin and will instead enable Discourse AI - Spam detection by default for hosted customers on Starter and Standard plans. Why are we making this change? Over the past few weeks, we’ve found our AI spam detector to deliver a superior performance over Akismet. We’ve had over 126 sites extensively using it and within Meta, we’ve personally seen over 96% success rate in detecting spam. On top of the performance, the setup would now be a default experience with customization and flexible options, should you need it. What do I need to do? If you are on our Starter or Standard hosting, nothing at all! The change wo…

We’re excited to share that you can now save multiple drafts, making it easier and more efficient to write in Discourse! Sometimes, you need to take a break or switch projects when writing a new topic or composing a reply. Previously, you couldn’t start a new topic draft until you posted your old draft — but you can now save multiple drafts without issue. This makes it possible for you to work on more than one writing project at the same time, without tricky workarounds like writing in a PM or copying and pasting your work into another tool. All your writing can happen in Discourse, at the pace that works best for you. Saving drafts Saving a draft still works the same …

While Discourse is widely recognized as powerful open-source forum software, Discourse has also served as our primary workplace/team collaboration tool from the very beginning. Many other companies and organizations have found incredible value in using it the same way. In this blog post, we share insights on how companies, research labs, and other groups that need spaces to collaborate can effectively use Discourse to support discussions that are worth remembering. Why teams choose Discourse for collaboration This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2024/10/discourse-a-team-collaboration-tool 6 posts - 4 particip…

For licensing reasons, we had to change the emoji sets. The following existing sets have been migrated automatically to a new set: apple → twemoji facebook_messenger → unicode google → noto google_classic → noto win10 → fluentui emoji_one → twemoji twitter → twemoji On top of fluent ui, noto, twemoji, and unicode, we also added the openmoji set. Admins can change the set at /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=Emoji%20set If there’s an existing open-source set you would like to see available in Discourse, please let us know. We understand that changing emojis can be a very visible change, but we didn’t have any other way around it. We prefer to lay a goo…

Background In the past, Discourse has shipped with e-mail normalization off. As a result of this, users can create multiple accounts using the same canonical e-mail, through the use of plus addressing. For example, a user with an account tied to bob@discourse.org is able to create another account tied to bob+again@discourse.org. Discourse comes with the normalize_emails site setting which can be flipped to either allow or disallow this. When turned on, it considers both e-mails above to be the same for purposes of unique account validation, and Bob won’t be able to create the second account. Why are we changing it? We have seen a big increase in spam sign-ups lately, wi…

Previously we rolled out Summarize on your Discourse with one-click!. Today we are doing it for AI search. Discourse AI - AI search is now available for Standard, Business, and Free tiers without the need for a 3rd party Large Language Model (LLM) provider. This means Discourse is now providing a hosted open-weights LLM for customers to enable Summarize. How do I enable AI search? You have the power to enable or disable AI search at any time from the What's New section. All related customizations are available within the Discourse AI plugin settings. What does being an experiment mean? This means that the AI feature is subject to change at any time, including its feat…

Background Under the current default settings, when signing up for an account with an e-mail that has already been registered, the sign-up form will inform of that: We are changing the default setting to not give away this information. Instead, the sign-up form will look like this, regardless of whether the e-mail is already registered or not: This also affects password resets in similar ways. With the setting disabled, the form provides immediate feedback that the e-mail is in the system: With the setting enabled it does not disclose that information: Why are we changing it? A malicious actor can use this feedback to perform an account enumeration, lettin…

Every day, customers are building, growing, and managing successful communities powered by Discourse. Today, we're highlighting the Revolut Community, a remarkable success story inspired by true Revolut fans who organically emerged on social media. With consumers at the heart of everything they do, Revolut wanted to create a dedicated platform for their customers to share feedback and receive official information. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2024/07/how-revolut-built-a-thriving-community-with-discourse 4 posts - 3 participants Read full topic View the full article

Introducing Advanced Sentiment Analysis: Powerful New Insights for Your Discourse Community We’re excited to announce a significant enhancement to Discourse AI with our new Sentiment Analysis Report feature. Building on last year’s Sentiment overview, this powerful tool gives administrators deeper insights into community sentiment across your forum. Where to Find It Navigate to your admin dashboard and look under the Reports section in the sidebar. You’ll find the new Sentiment analysis option alongside the existing Sentiment overview report. Flexible Analysis Options This comprehensive report empowers you to: Filter by specific parent categories Group results by c…

As we’ve shared previously, we have improved our signup and login pages to use a fullscreen design, which provides a more streamlined and focused experience for your members as they join and interact with your community. After thorough testing, we’re ready to begin launching this improvement in our communities. Over the coming weeks, your community will be updated to use this new signup and login screen design. This is a visual change, so how members signup and login should stay the same. Desktop experience Mobile experience If you’re ready to make the switch today or want to test this change proactively, please go to the Admin area, click All Site Setting…

We’re excited to announce the new Starter plan, the easiest and fastest way to launch a community with Discourse. Starter offers public or private sites with unlimited members at $20 a month! This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2024/09/introducing-the-new-starter-plan 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

Good news! We have now added the invite link to the sidebar on all sites, and selecting it opens the invite popup directly. The link is only shown to people who have permission to invite. For those sites that prefer not to have the invite link so prominent or want to move it below ... more they can set it up as they see fit by using “Customize this section”. You can also add link to the popup directly from anywhere using the https://yoursite.com/new-invite URL. For more guidance on setting up and using the invite system, see Creating and using invites. This change comes as part of a handful of tweaks we are making to the invite system. The goal is to make it quicke…

Good news! We have now added the invite link to the sidebar on all sites, and selecting it opens the invite popup directly. The link is only shown to people who have permission to invite. Sites can customize the placement of the invite link or remove it entirely using the “Customize this section” option, which is found under the “… more” menu. You can also add link to the popup directly from anywhere using the https://yoursite.com/new-invite URL. For more guidance on setting up and using the invite system, see Creating and using invites. This change comes as part of a handful of tweaks we are making to the invite system. The goal is to make it quicker and easier to…