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After the holidays are behind us I am going to put my attention to getting things done here I've been pushing off. Mainly because I was combining my tech sites. That's done so it's time for Forum Squared to get the things done I should have already done. List of planned items: Upgrade to Invision 5 beta. Currently at beta 9.1 Add the link directory. I removed it after I had a database crash. Revamp the downloads section and add more downloads. Work on the resources section. Get some articles off the drawing board and onto the site. Move my personal blog to here. This is not a priority so it might be a while. That's for starters. …

Forum Squared needs to add another staff member. The role will be to start topics and engage in the threads by our users. You'll also keep things in line and make sure no gets out of hand. This will eventually turn into a paid position once the site grows and starts to make money. It will be paid based on a revenue sharing model. If you are interested send me a PM.

Invision Community 5.0.4 Beta 1 is now available Please celebrate responsibly. A whole two weeks has passed since our last release. The extra week allowed us to fully review a few larger updates that we've held back and require a beta or two to fully test before we're happy to include in a full release. Things to testThere have been some areas that have received a lot of attention and need extra special testing, these include: Page Editor (now works correctly for right-to-left languages but needs some testing in LTR) Custom badges (lots of work to make them more efficient and store a built version in SVG format) Editor bug fixes (lots of complex fixes, so please test the …

We have been working on a new rich text editor mode for our composer so that it’s easier to write on Discourse. We’re now ready to start testing this mode out on Meta to get more feedback from our community on this feature! This topic will serve as both a guide to testing the new composer and a hub for tracking feedback. Thanks in advance for all your help! Getting to know the new composer The new composer is a rich text editor that simplifies the writing experience, particularly for non-technical users who are not comfortable with Markdown. This editor still supports Markdown, but formatting is rendered immediately for a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) exper…

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…

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…

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…

At Discourse, we are committed to fostering safe and healthy online communities. To support this, we’re introducing an important update that allows forum administrators to access and manage group chats within their communities. This update ensures that community leaders can effectively manage group chat memberships, enforce guidelines, and respond to safety concerns when needed. It also helps communities align with evolving online safety legislation, providing admins with the necessary tools to maintain a secure and welcoming space for all members. We believe this change will empower admins to uphold community standards while continuing to provide a space for meaningful…

Invision Community 5.0.3 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.2 and features many UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. What's next?We expect 5.0.4 to follow within two to three weeks as we work in some larger fixes that will require more testing. We may release a beta release ahead of the full release to ensure that any bugs from those larger fixes are caught and fixed early. If we see anything more pressing, we'll release a patch which can be applied via your Admin Control Panel. As always, thank you for your testing and reports. It really does help us!

Discourse 3.4.1 Stable Release Discourse strongly recommends that all sites follow the default tests-passed branch of Discourse. The “stable” branch is more focused on lack of change than lack of bugs - all releases, including those on tests-passed and beta are production ready. Bug Fixes Improve group name validation (31315) Wikipedia onebox images and sections (31384) Language parser matches with dashes or underscores (31381) Ensure revoke_ungranted_titles! works with user_ids (31371) Adds further support for ‘prioritize_full_name_in_ux’ setting (31346) Make permalink search work even when there’re 100+ permalinks (31354) Don’t show   in date to button (31352…

New features in 3.5.0.beta1 Easy switching between light and dark mode If you’re using a theme that has both dark and light modes, you now have the option of displaying a selector to your users for them to choose which mode they prefer. The selector can appear in the footer or the header, and allows users to select dark, light or auto, which will select the appropriate mode based on their system settings. This core feature replaces the now-deprecated theme component that provided this selector. Read the announcement here. More useful information when flagging content To help site admins remain compliant with evolving legislation, the flag modal now includes text pr…

Organic growth on social media means you build a huge fan following and get tons of engagements without having to spend money on ads. Organic growth on social media requires patience. Unless you already have built a strong personal brand or have celebrity status, the most effective way to expand your reach is through paid advertising. While social media offers free exposure, turning that exposure into conversions demands consistent effort, strategic planning, and financial investment.

Well, there are multiple methods to get traffic to your site, however, getting people to actually visit your site is very difficult. Well, you might have done SEO, marketed on social media or sent newsletters and think that you will get traffic. But despite your hard work traffic is not guaranteed. Your SEO effort will get you traffic only when your website ranks high on Search Engine Result Page for high traffic keywords. You might run ads for traffic but there is a price to pay.

We're pleased to announce that CSAM scanning is now available at no extra cost. What is CSAM scanning?CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. The media served by your community will be scanned to identify any matches in a central CSAM database. These lists are provided by leading child safety advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). CSAM scanning is now recommended to increase compliance in many areas, and you can rest assured that Invision Community will now block any harmful media from being shown in your community. Moderating large communities can be challenging when your members are able to upload photos, and this s…

Invision Community 5.0.2 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.1 and features many UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. This release also resolves several issues with Downloads screenshots and thumbnails. What's next?This week we'll continue to triage and manage incoming bug reports and we expect to have another maintenance release out next week to ensure that bug fixes are resolved as quickly as possible. We then expect 5.0.4 to follow within two to three weeks as we work in some larger fixes that will require more testing. If we see anything more pressing, …

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…

I have never used it myself and I have used forum running on Discourse. I would like to use this software for my self hosted forum. How do you rate this software, is it better than other open source forum software?

Anyone please explain to me how does this forum script works? It is open source, right? How do I start using NodeBB for my self hosted forum?

How do you know if your community is having a positive effect on the broader organization it represents? Where do you turn when you have to defend the existence of your community? Metrics. They tell the story of your community’s impact. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/02/metrics-that-matter-a-guide-to-selecting-the-right-ones-for-your-community 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Invision Community 5.0.1 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.0 and features many editor and UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. What's next?This week we'll continue to triage and manage incoming bug reports and we expect to have another maintenance release out next week to ensure that bug fixes are resolved as quickly as possible. If we see anything more pressing, we'll release a patch which can be applied via your Admin Control Panel. As always, thank you for your testing and reports. It really does help us!