AWS

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. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/02/unpacking-discourse-3-4 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

Discourse 3.4 is now live! We’ve implemented major changes to simplify the process of managing your community. One-click AI spam detector A more consistent admin experience Simplified signup and login flow for community members AI support via ask.discourse.com DiscourseHub updates … and so much more! Check out our blog post, as well as the 3.4.0.beta4 release-notes topic for details. Discourse – 4 Feb 25 Unpacking Discourse 3.4 We’re always striving to make community management easier. That’s why Discourse 3.4 has introduced a variety of improvements from the admin to AI-powered tools to fight spam and help manage your community. 4 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

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 way — in the composer, click Close and then click Save draft for later. Note: You may save many draft topics and draft replies to different topics — but we only support one draft reply per topic. In other words, you can’t save two draft replies to this topic — but you could save one draft reply for this topic, one for a different topic, etc. Accessing drafts When you’re ready to keep writing, you have a few options for accessing your drafts. You can find your five most recent drafts in the New Topic drop-down menu, or see all your drafts in the My Drafts link in your sidebar. Coming soon: Improvements to My Drafts To continue this project, we’re planning to spruce up the My Drafts area to make it easier to find and manage your current drafts. Keep an eye out for those changes soon! Share your feedback We’re looking forward to hearing what you think! Please share your questions, comments, and ideas with us so we can continue improving the Discourse writing experience. 4 posts - 4 participants Read full topic

WARNING! If your database is very large, you will need a lot of extra disk space (2x database size) and should be very careful with this upgrade! We’ve just landed changes to upgrade our Docker image to PostgreSQL 15. Any site admins rebuilding Discourse from the command line will be upgraded to PostgreSQL 15 from the previous PostgreSQL 13. Note that if you held back from upgrading when the PostgreSQL 13 update happened back in 2020, you can skip that upgrade and go straight to PostgreSQL 15. If you had held back the upgrade previously, change the PostgreSQL template in app.yml from templates/postgres.12.template.yml to templates/postgres.template.yml. As with any upgrade, it is strongly advised to take a backup before doing anything. Updating Official Install Guide (single container) On you next rebuild, you will see this message at the end: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPGRADE OF POSTGRES COMPLETE Old 13 database is stored at /shared/postgres_data_old To complete the upgrade, rebuild again using: ./launcher rebuild app ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That means everything went well in the upgrade! You just need to issue a new rebuild to get your site back and running. Data Container Install If you are running a setup with a dedicated data container based in the sample supplied in our discourse_docker repository, you want to be sure you are shutting down PostgreSQL in a safe and clean way. Nowadays, we have background jobs running queries spanning several minutes, so shutting down the web container will help the data container be shutdown safely. ./launcher stop web_only ./launcher stop data ./launcher rebuild data ./launcher rebuild data ./launcher rebuild web_only Before issuing the first rebuild to the data container, you can tail the PostgreSQL log to see if it was shutdown properly. Running a tail -f shared/data/log/var-log/postgres/current should give you the following log if it was clean: 2025-01-24 09:19:06.437 UTC [37] LOG: received smart shutdown request 2025-01-24 09:19:06.444 UTC [37] LOG: background worker "logical replication launcher" (PID 54) exited with exit code 1 2025-01-24 09:19:06.446 UTC [49] LOG: shutting down 2025-01-24 09:19:06.468 UTC [37] LOG: database system is shut down Doing a manual update / space constrained environments YOU MUST BACKUP THE POSTGRES_DATA BEFORE TRYING THIS If you are in a constrained space environment without any way to get more space you can try the following: ./launcher stop app #(or both web_only and data if that is your case) mkdir -p /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data_new docker run --rm \ --entrypoint=/bin/bash \ -v /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/13/data \ -v /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data_new:/var/lib/postgresql/15/data \ tianon/postgres-upgrade:13-to-15 \ -c "apt-get update && apt-get install -y postgresql-15-pgvector && docker-upgrade" mv /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data_old mv /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data_new /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_data ./launcher rebuild app #(or first data and then web_only if that is your case) On my tests this procedure requires less than 1x your current database size in free space. Postponing the update If you need to postpone the update during your next rebuild, you can swap the PostgreSQL template on your app.yml file by changing "templates/postgres.template.yml" to "templates/postgres.13.template.yml". This is not recommended, as some site admins will forget to revert the change afterwards. Post update optional tasks Optimizing PostgreSQL statistics After the update, the new PostgreSQL won’t have table statistics on hand. You can generate those using: cd /var/discourse ./launcher enter app su postgres psql \connect discourse VACUUM VERBOSE ANALYZE; \q exit exit Or this one-line version of the above: /var/discourse/launcher run app "echo 'vacuum verbose analyze;' | su postgres -c 'psql discourse'" Cleaning up old data For a standard install, you can delete the old data in PG13 format with the following command: cd /var/discourse ./launcher cleanup If you have a separate data container, you’ll need to remove the backup copy like this: rm -fr /var/discourse/shared/data/postgres_data_old/ FAQ The source cluster was not shut down cleanly If you get a upgrade failed with the above message, you can try a simpler approach to get it back into a better state. Restart the old container with ./launcher start app. Wait a few minutes until it is back up. Now shut it down again with ./launcher stop app. After that tail the logs to see if it was a clean one: tail -f shared/data/log/var-log/postgres/current 2020-05-13 18:33:33.457 UTC [36] LOG: received smart shutdown request 2020-05-13 18:33:33.464 UTC [36] LOG: worker process: logical replication launcher (PID 52) exited with exit code 1 2020-05-13 18:33:33.465 UTC [47] LOG: shutting down 2020-05-13 18:33:33.479 UTC [36] LOG: database system is shut down If the logs look like above, you can now try to upgrade again using ./launcher rebuild app. lc_collate values for database “postgres” do not match This errors happens if you are using non-default locales for your database. It was reported that you need 3 variables for it to succeed. Ensure that the env: section of you app.yml file has the 3 lines: LC_ALL: en_US.UTF-8 LANG: en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE: en_US.UTF-8 Changing en_US.UTF-8 to your locale. Every rebuild does the upgrade again aka upgrade loop When this happens your upgrade logs will contain mv: cannot move '/shared/postgres_data' to '/shared/postgres_data_old/postgres_data': Directory not empty mv: cannot move '/shared/postgres_data_new' to '/shared/postgres_data/postgres_data_new': Directory not empty This means that there are still files from the last upgrade lingering around. Move those elsewhere before continuing. Upgrade Complete suggestion scripts - do I need to do anything? Once the upgrade completes, you’ll see output from the pg_upgrade message saying: Upgrade Complete ---------------- Optimizer statistics are not transferred by pg_upgrade. Once you start the new server, consider running: /usr/lib/postgresql/15/bin/vacuumdb --all --analyze-in-stages Running this script will delete the old cluster's data files: ./delete_old_cluster.sh You can safely ignore this message. I did skip the PostgreSQL 13 update, what to do now? You can follow the standard instructions at the top of this guide and they will upgrade from your version to 15 without issues. If you are following the space constrained instructions, adapt the version numbers accordingly. Rebuilding indexes can give you significant disk space savings. Follow the steps from our PostgreSQL 13 update after the upgrade. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

- Colin Mueller, Community Manager at Sonar, describing the impact of implementing Discourse AI to address a sudden and disruptive spam attack. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/01/sonars-25-cent-solution-to-spam-detection 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Discourse. It is so far ahead of xenforo, Invision and vbulletin as far as modernization, features and interaction yet it gets little to no recognition. Since I've had it running on https://www.general-forums.net I am blown away by the way it works. Any new community I start will be on Discourse.

Communitech a company I used years back. Held my site files hostage when I wanted to move to my own server. I never used any other hosting company since. All self hosted.

PHP is the most popular. I would think out of the box and go with Ruby or NodeJS.

Years back when I was starting out with SEO I learned the cloaking technique. You use an anchor text link to your competitors main keyqword and link it to your site. You hide it with CSS. At the time it worked well.

To improve the clarity of how they are used, we’ve renamed “Staff Notices” to “Official Notices”. This change acknowledges that both staff members and TL4 users can create these useful notices. Additionally, notices now display the author’s name and link to their profile, providing more transparency about who posted them. This authorship information is only visible to staff: This update makes it clearer who can create notices while maintaining their official nature and improving attribution. The update was committed and merged in this pull request: github.com/discourse/discourse FEATURE: Add attribution to staff notice and rename functionality discourse:main ← discourse:feature/staff-notice-rename opened 06:47AM - 22 Jan 25 UTC martin-brennan +309 -122 The name "Staff Notice" was not quite right since TL4 users can also add these …notices. This commit changes the wording to "Official Notice". In addition to this, currently you have to go look into the staff action logs to see who is responsible for a notice. This commit stores the ID of the user who created the notice, then shows this information on each notice to staff users. Finally, I migrated the ChangePostNoticeModal component to gjs.     1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

I never thought about using google to find topics. Going to give it a try.

Never looked at that way. You are right.

We just released a feature that lets you define usage quotas for Discourse AI Hopefully, this helps you all experiment more widely with AI features, given that you can restrict the actual cost you will end up incurring. Read more at: Configuring LLM Usage Quotas in Discourse AI Site Management This guide explains how to configure and manage usage quotas for Large Language Models (LLMs) in Discourse AI. Required user level: Administrator Summary LLM Usage Quotas allow administrators to control and monitor AI resource consumption by setting limits on token usage and interactions for different user groups. This helps maintain cost efficiency while ensuring fair access to AI features across your community. Configuration Accessing quota settings Navig… 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

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 simpler UI for adding logos, selecting fonts, and color palettes. A new theme focused on ease of use We are beginning to design a new theme, which we intend to make the default theme for all new communities, that is specifically designed with ease of use in mind. Our goal is to create a beautiful out-of-the-box experience for Discourse, particularly for those without the resources, know-how, or patience for in-depth site appearance customizations. In full swing One-click spam detector We now offer a one-click spam detector available in the AI plugin settings. It helps identify potential spam using LLMs and flags it for site moderators to inspect in the review queue. As an admin, if you want to use a Discourse hosted open-weights LLM for this feature, simply enable it from the What’s New section. We’ve also been making some targeted improvements to the review queue to take advantage of these features and are in the early stages of discussing a more focused effort on improvements there. Support for multiple drafts We are in the middle of this project to make it easier to write and respond to topics in your community. We’re beginning with updates to make it easier to access your existing drafts through the New Topic button, and will soon be touching up the Drafts list before finalizing support for multiple drafts. Composer redesign We’re in the middle of internal testing for our redesigned, rich text editor to ensure it supports basic formatting and features. Next, we’ll be working on updating the composer toolbar and then we will continue our testing here on Meta and with a select beta group of customers. Admin interface design consistency We made significant progress in the past month in making the admin UI more consistent. We still have more planned here, but if you haven’t spent time browsing around in the admin UI recently, take it for a spin and let us know if anything pops out as being inconsistent. More tools for legal compliance In light of new legislation for online platforms, such as the Digital Services Act, we are providing more tools for admins to ensure their sites are compliant with these laws. These will largely be optional new settings that will be available to all sites. Post menu, topic-list and icon upgrades Our work on these behind-the-scenes projects is nearing completion. Most communities have been automatically switched to the new implementations. If you see any warning banners about incompatible customisations, then please take a look at the relevant topic for the topic list, the post menu, or the fontawesome upgrade. Wrapping up Instant plan upgrades on hosting For sites on our hosting, it’s now possible to instantly upgrade your plan from your admin dashboard, so you don’t need to wait if you run into a feature that you need but which is not available on your current plan. Of course, we’re still here to help if you want to discuss any plan changes, so you can always reach out to our support team at team@discourse.org anytime with any questions about your site or your plan. Adding one-click unsubscribes for community emails We’ve added support for one-click / easy unsubscribing from emails sent from Discourse communities so we can comply with recent Google and Yahoo requirements. Making it easier for uninterested users to unsubscribe from emails protects overall email deliverability, since those users are then less likely to report unwanted email as spam. Improved setup wizard for new sites We have worked through some incremental improvements to the setup wizard, making the options clearer, and steps ordered more naturally. The preview pane and font previews have also been updated to make setting up your site’s design more intuitive. New developer toolbar We’ve introduced a new developer toolbar that can be accessed when running Discourse in development mode to provide one-click access to commonly needed developer tools like the ability to see locations of plugin outlets and to toggle on and off safe mode and verbose localization. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

It was one of the main reasons I am migrating my sites back to Invision. Plus the development time is set. They have an actual roadmap.

These are all sold. Will have more in the future.

I moved this site along with most of the other sites to a new VM. The new VM is running Ubuntu 24.04. I've had Windows Server for over 20 years so this is a big change for me. While I originally had my sites on Redhat many years ago moving back is very different. It is slowly coming back to me. Installing the necessary software at the command line was different for sure. There was some trial and error. I did get everything working fairly fast. Things don't seem much different except for the paths. In any case we are now on Linux. If you experience any bugs please let me know. I am still configuring things and fixing permission issues as they come up.

We’ve added a new administrative feature that allows staff to bulk select and delete multiple user accounts directly from the admin users list. We saw communities undergo large spam waves, so we implemented this feature to make handling those spam waves easier. This feature works in a very similar fashion to bulk actions in topic lists. We’ve published a dedicated document that explains how to use it: Bulk-delete multiple users as a staff user Site Management Discourse offers the ability to delete multiple users directly from the admin users list. This feature is useful in situations where unwanted user accounts are created, such as during a spam wave, and you want to delete those accounts in a quick way. To use this feature, visit the admin users list at /admin/users/list, or any of its variants, and follow the steps: Enable the bulk select mode by clicking the bulk select icon [image] at the top of the user list next to the Username column A… 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

I'd like to wish everyone a very healthy and Happy New Year.

We recently launched a new feature for Helper called Smart dates, which helps you turn any text related to time and date into Discourse-friendly timezone-supported dates. Give it a try and let us know what you think! 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

I have several xenforo licenses for sale. Most have 6+ months of support and upgrades left. Most have 1 or more of the official addons included. Here is what I have and prices. Expires September 29Th 2025. Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $265. Price $185. Expires September 8TH 2025. Forum only. Purchased new $195. Price $125. Expires August 24TH 2025. Gallery, Resource Manager and Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $395. Price $285. Expires August 23RD 2025. Resource Manager included. Purchased new $265. Price $180. Expires August 16TH 2025. Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $255. Price $175. Expires July 6TH 2025. Resource Manager and Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $325. Price $225. Expires July 5TH 2025. Resource Manager and Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $325. Price $225. Expires May 22ND 2025. Resource Manager and Enhanced Search included. Purchased new $325. Price $200. Expires July 24TH 2025. Media Gallery included. Purchased new $265. Price $180. All payments will be made with Paypal. No wire transfers or bank drafts. Prices are negotiable. Be realistic in your bid.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you. Here's to the new year being filled with new members and lots of posts on your communities.

Welcome Hulk. Nice to see you here. I fixed the problem with permissions. I also moved you to the visiting admin group.

Let me check permissions. I'll get it fixed for you right away.

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. There is a lot in v5 so I'm sure there will be more that I come up with. I also plan to incorporate a revenue sharing system to give back to active users. Investigating how to put it together using Pages and Commerce. Happy holidays everyone.