Discourse 3.0 has officially launched, bringing major new features including real-time chat, user status, a customizable sidebar, and an improved notifications menu to foster more thoughtful, purposeful online discussions. Celebrating nine years since Discourse 1.0, the team emphasizes its ongoing mission to elevate online discourse for communities of all sizes. Users on hosted plans are already upgraded; self-hosted users can update via the admin dashboard. A webinar was held on January 24th, with a recording now available on YouTubejoanna_gaudyn and jomaxro. Community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with users like darkpixlz and twofoursixeight praising the update as the most significant yet. Questions about migration were addressed — no special migration is needed, just a standard upgrade Jagster. Breaking changes are rare and typically flagged with deprecation warnings Alexander. Users can disable chat uploads via the chat allow uploads setting Buntspecht, though chat message search remains a requested feature rishabh. Some users, like haydenjames, seek UI customization options such as moving the sidebar. The team thanked hosted customers and open-source contributors, including ghassanmas, angusmcleod, and others, for helping build Discourse. A free 14-day trial is available for new users.
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Discourse 3.0! We are bringing our customers and users some major new capabilities to enable communities to have thoughtful, purposeful discussions online. This new release includes real-time chat and user status to enable more informal communication, a customizable sidebar for easier access to the things each user cares about most, and a new notifications interface that makes it easier to decide what is important to follow up on, along with many other improvements.
I actually managed to make it in somehow! Didn’t expect that.
Excited for version 3 and the future of Discourse. Version 2 was great and I can’t wait to see what the future holds. I’d definitely do the zoom but I’ll be busy then unfortunately.
There are few and rare times that breaking changes are introduced in my opinion, Discourse goes through a lot of tests, when possible breaking changes are going to be introduced (for example in some method in the Rails code or javascript) usually throws a warning in the console, for example:
“someMethod is deprecated since Discourse vX.X, use x instead. Removal in Discourse vX.Y.Z”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such stable software, and with all the facilities in the world to update almost without complications, no need to even worry about migrations or precompiling assets (As long as the official guides are used)
great job! The Chat looks really nice and feels more intuitive than the old messaging system. But one drawback I see:
We use the forum in our association and we don’t have a lot of money for a big server. So I somehow restricted the use of files upload in the forum. In the new chat I’ve seen the attachment functionality. Can I disable that somewhere?
Kind Regards,
Buntspecht
Edit: found the setting: “chat allow uploads” - but one major drawback could be that the chat messages are not searchable
Although late, 3.0 is a big jump from no sidebar or chat, to those features being in every discourse instance. The sidebar is useful due to easy navigation. 3.0 is the biggest Discourse update of them all (and greatest)
(As long as the official guides are used)
what do I do with Personal Messages?