Conversations, not pages
Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button? We’ve replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.
Chat in real time
Create channels for community members to chat more informally and build relationships. When things come up that belong in a more discoverable place, chat messages can be quoted in topics where the discussion can continue over time.
Empowering possibilities with AI
Our one-stop solution for integrating Artificial Intelligence to your Discourse community, and making it easier to use and moderate.
A personal touch
A custom sidebar and deliberately chosen user preferences allow community members to fine-tune their experience on your site to best meet their needs while out-of-the-box defaults and site settings allow you to configure the default experience for your community.
Simple, but with context
Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Expand context at the bottom and top of each post, and also in quotes, to reveal the full conversation without losing your place.
Born mobile, born to touch
Discourse was designed for high resolution touch devices, with a built-in mobile layout. Read or post from your laptop, tablet, and phone in your browser of choice, or our Discourse iOS app and Discourse Android app.
Links automatically expand
Want to share a cool link you found? Just paste it in on a single line and we’ll make it awesome. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, Flickr, and hundreds of other popular websites automatically expand to provide additional context and information.
Single sign-on
Seamlessly integrate Discourse with your existing site’s login system with easy, robust single sign on.
Trust system
As members become trusted regulars over time, they earn abilities to help maintain their community.
Community moderation
Let the community suppress spam and dangerous content, and amicably resolve disputes.
Spam blocking
Built in Akismet spam protection and heuristics including new user sandboxing, user flag blocking, and standard nofollow.
Social login
Easily add common social logins like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.
Summarize topics
Use the Summarize button to condense long topics to just the most interesting and popular posts.
Badges
Encourage positive community behaviors through the included set of badges, or add your own custom badges.
Emoji
Access a searchable list of standard emoji. Choose from four different emoji sets, or define your own custom emoji.
Reply via email
When you aren’t active on the website, your notifications will be automatically sent to you via email. Reply via email from anywhere, on any device.
Two-factor authentication
Enhance your account security with the free Android or iOS authenticator apps.
Admin dashboard
Your most relevant and essential community health metrics are only a click away.
Official plugins
Add chat integration, topic voting, Google Adsense, and more with our officially supported plugins.
Comprehensive API
Anything you see on screen, you can also do via an API call. Discourse is a JavaScript app that talks to our Discourse API.
100% open source
Incorporate Discourse into your site with complete confidence – the code belongs to everyone.
One-click updates
Automatic notification of new versions in the dashboard, with a one-click web update process.
Plus so much more!
Configure
- Translations for 16 languages and counting
- SEO optimized for Google indexing and searching
- Markdown, BBCode, and HTML formatting in posts
- Automatic backups
- CDN support
- Blog integration
- Automatic & custom avatars
- Email invitations
- Mailing list support
- Dark mode and WCAG color scheme
Discuss
- Anonymous posting
- File attachments
- Hide spoilers
- Embeddable polls
- Desktop notifications
- Auto-save drafts
- Post revision history
- Personal messaging
- Drag & drop image uploads
- Collaboratively edit wiki posts
Admin
- Inline & bulk moderation
- Moderator flag queue
- Sitewide alerts & pinned topics
- Make your site invite-only
- Easily add private spaces
- Site analytics dashboard
- Post approval
- Self-managing usergroups
- Promote popular topics
- Incoming & outgoing link tracking