ai Three Ways to Deploy AI in Community Platforms (and Why Choice Matters) Most platforms lock operators into a single AI integration; Discourse takes a different approach, offering three distinct deployment paths so communities can choose the model, provider, and level of control that actually fits their needs.
case study Elfsight: How a Wishlist Category Shaped 700 Feature Releases How Elfsight turned their Discourse community into a structured product feedback engine - and shipped over 700 features that started as a customer request.
ruby How We Fixed YAML Comment Preservation in Ruby (And Why We Sponsored It) Discourse solved a five-year infrastructure headache by sponsoring psych-pure, a Ruby YAML library that preserves comments through programmatic edits - keeping years of hard-won institutional knowledge intact.
case study Make: Building a Community-Powered Knowledge Hub with Discourse When the automation platform Integromat became Make, they moved their thriving Facebook community to Discourse to create a searchable, durable knowledge hub that serves users far beyond real-time conversation.
ai Your Community as Your AI Knowledge Layer By structuring a community as a forum with clear Q&A, tagged discussions, marked solutions, and searchable archives, you can turn scattered insights into a durable knowledge layer.
discover Discover Roundup: Mac Software Communities This month's Discover Roundup highlights Discourse communities built around beloved indie Apple apps - NetNewsWire, Bear, and Infuse - where developers engage directly with users and peer support becomes searchable knowledge.
community management Before You "Build a Community," Decide: Library or Coffee Shop? We analysed traffic across thousands of Discourse communities and found something intriguing: the internet has been using the word “community” to describe two very different things.
product-management The Product Manager's Guide to Non-Addictive Design Engagement is the metric product teams chase, but maximising time-in-app usually means spending down your users’ time, attention, and well-being.
ai Data Portability Is Table Stakes For Community Builders In The Age Of AI With the growing ubiquity of AI, community builders should consider data portability as table stakes when choosing which platform to focus on. It makes sense to meet people where they are, but it’s not your home unless you hold the keys.
ai The AI Search Revolution's Hidden Dependency AI search is only as good as its sources. As discovery shifts from keywords to synthesis, forums - with their structured threads and complete context - are becoming the most cited, most trusted knowledge infrastructure on the web.
ai AI Can Code (But It Doesn’t Care About Quality) Every engineer now has a code-producing machine in their hands, but volume rarely equates to quality. How do individual contributors and tech leads maintain standards when it’s suddenly much easier to create than it is to edit?
community management 2025: Our Year in Review As 2025 winds down, we reflect on a year of product evolution and change. From launching AI-powered spam detection and the Horizon theme to returning to a profit-first operating model, read about how we’re building a sustainable community future.
discover Discourse Discover: Linux Communities Welcome to our December Discover Roundup, where we highlight communities doing creative and inspiring work with Discourse. This month's theme: Linux (and the tools that make it work!) Framework Framework makes laptops you can actually repair and upgrade yourself. Their laptops work beautifully with Linux, and they'
updates Our Commitment to Your Ongoing Success with Discourse We are focusing on our release cycle, improving our support commitments, and investing in the features and product updates that make Discourse the platform of choice for thoughtful online communities.
success stories Discourse Discover: Knowledge Base Through Conversation Welcome to our Discover Roundup, where we highlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse. This month, we’re focusing on a particular kind of community: knowledge bases built on ongoing conversation. These communities prove that when you give people the right structure and tools, shared knowledge compounds. Peer
use cases How Enterprise Migrations to Discourse Actually Work If you’re responsible for an enterprise community, you’ve probably had a version of this conversation already: “Our current platform is creaking. We need better search, better moderation tools, better integrations. But if we move and something goes wrong, it’s on us.” Most engineering leaders aren’t afraid
culture 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 How to Communicate the Value of Your Community Every community manager eventually faces the same question from stakeholders: Do we really need a community? It’s a fair question, and one you should be ready to answer. Communities don’t survive on goodwill alone; they depend on continued support from the organizations that fund them. Also, knowing how
community management The Death of Community Memory I recently spent forty minutes searching through Slack trying to find a technical decision — made eight months ago — about an app that 60% of my creative life depends on. I knew the conversation had happened. I remembered participating in it. I could picture the rough time frame and vaguely recall
community management The Community Lifecycle: From Launch to Legacy Every time someone emails Discourse support asking to extend the free trial on one of our hosting plans because “14 days isn’t long enough for the community to take off”, a tiny part of me dies. A decade ago, community builders recognised that 6 months probably wasn’t long
use cases How Discourse Uses Discourse One of the best things about working at Discourse is that we practice what we preach: we run our 100+ employee company entirely on our own platform. From chatting with coworkers and planning features to tracking bugs, looking up documentation, and even scheduling time off, everything happens in one place.
success stories Discourse Discover: AI Communities Edition Welcome to our Discourse Discover Roundup, where we spotlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse. Discourse Discover showcases communities that are examples of what happens when thoughtful platform design meets engaged users. Many use Discourse to support commercial products and software, others to coordinate open source development, and
ai Discourse MCP is here! As soon as Anthropic open sourced their Model Context Protocol (MCP) proposal for interfacing with AI agents almost a year ago, we started getting excited about how good of a match it was for Discourse. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI assistants to live
design How We Built Horizon with Design Driven Development Horizon is a simple, beautiful theme designed to provide a great user experience for communities without extra effort on the admin’s part. Like most open source software organizations, Discourse started out being primarily engineering driven. The core developers built much of the functionality before a pair of designers were
