Including your site in Discourse Discover

[Discourse]

This guide explains how to opt-in your Discourse community to be included in Discourse Discover, a new initiative to make Discourse communities more discoverable.

Required user level: Administrator

What is Discourse Discover?

Discourse Discover is a standalone site that makes it easy for anyone to find communities that use Discourse as their platform. It serves as a showcase of unique communities within the Discourse ecosystem, increasing your community’s visibility and allowing others to draw inspiration from the diversity of Discourse-powered sites.

How to join Discourse Discover

Opting in to Discourse Discover is a straightforward process:

1. Log in to your Discourse site as an administrator.
2. Go to Admin > Config > Site Admin, or navigate directly to /admin/config/site-admin.
3. Find the “include in discourse discover” setting (you can use the filter box to search for “discover”).
4. Check the checkbox next to “include in discourse discover”.
5. Your site will now be eligible for inclusion in Discourse Discover; sites are typically added within a few business days of submission.

Verifying your site’s inclusion

To verify that your site is correctly configured to be included in Discourse Discover, you can check your site’s basic information JSON file:

1. Add /site/basic-info.json to the end of your site’s URL. For example: https://yourdiscoursesite.com/site/basic-info.json
2. Look for the include_in_discourse_discover field in the JSON response.
3. Ensure its value is set to true.

Example:

{
  "logo_url": "https://yourdiscoursesite.com/uploads/default/original/1X/logo.png",
  "title": "Your Site Name",
  "description": "Your site description",
  "login_required": false,
  "locale": "en",
  "include_in_discourse_discover": true
}

Benefits of joining Discourse Discover

By opting into Discourse Discover, you’re:

1. Increasing your community’s visibility to potential new members.
2. Joining a showcase of unique Discourse communities.
3. Contributing to the growth and diversity of the Discourse ecosystem.
4. Potentially drawing inspiration from other communities within the network.

Privacy and control

When you opt in to Discourse Discover:

• You’re allowing Discourse to feature your community on the Discover page and in Discourse marketing materials.
• You will share basic community metadata (site URL, title, and locale) with Discourse.
• The promotion of communities is at Discourse’s discretion.

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-08-21T13:36:23Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[Imgbi]

Are there any extra requirements needed for the site inclusion to be approved?
Requirements like -

• Age of the site
• The forum’s activities ie how active it is
• The content visibility to non-users etc

Also, how long does it take for the inclusion requests to be approved?
Thanks.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

We generally reserve judgment here, but as a guideline.

• Sites must be public - content must be visible to the public
• Site must be active, we don’t want to feature ghost towns it helps nobody
• Age of site does not matter that much - as long as it was around for say a month so we can assess
• Inclusion should be “within a few business days”

[Timelord]

I have opted into this since day one, and from what I can tell, my site has not been included. Is there a way for me to tell why? From what I can see, I have followed all the needed steps.

My Broken Computer

[JammyDodger]

It looks like your site doesn’t have much recent activity, so won’t be eligible:

@sam

Site must be active, we don’t want to feature ghost towns it helps nobody

[Timelord]

Looks like my new site got picked up, and is in the discover directory now

[hhf.technology]

congratulations

[eisammy (Sammy)]

Any possibility to include new categories? look

Forum Jogos is about gaming

Segredin is about Health Mental but not set

[eisammy (Sammy)]

I tried using your .json to build a discovery page focused only on instances from my country, but apparently the Discovery instance is blocking direct requests via CORS.

So I’m here suggesting a way to share the Discover link already filtered by language/country instances to make it easier to share. I know it’s a small request, but it makes a difference for me.

[Jun]

Hello.My site: https://whdushu.com，also named 观点社区. Response of basic-info.json:

{
“logo_url”: “https://whdushu.com/uploads/default/original/1X/491dfb143791ba5748f0ce1bd7775056884e0253.png”,
“logo_small_url”: “https://whdushu.com/uploads/default/original/1X/491dfb143791ba5748f0ce1bd7775056884e0253.png”,
“apple_touch_icon_url”: “https://whdushu.com/uploads/default/optimized/1X/7cf034f720d5e47d163c49695ea970f456cc882c_2_180x180.png”,
“favicon_url”: “https://whdushu.com/uploads/default/optimized/1X/7cf034f720d5e47d163c49695ea970f456cc882c_2_32x32.png”,
“title”: “观点社区”,
“description”: “听见不同的观点”,
“header_primary_color”: “333”,
“header_background_color”: “fff”,
“login_required”: false,
“locale”: “zh_CN”,
“include_in_discourse_discover”: true,
“mobile_logo_url”: “https://whdushu.com/uploads/default/original/1X/491dfb143791ba5748f0ce1bd7775056884e0253.png”
}

It can’t be searched in discovery by “观点社区”.

[philh]

Very pleased to see our project included. I noticed it was included when checking ranking for the site name, top position. And kudos to @Discourse

[mononym]

Hello. We had enabled the include_in_discourse_discover setting while the site was not public. Now the site is public (with some categories reserved for members but no approval required on signup). How to rejoin the pipeline to get listed in Discover ? Many thanks from Eupalinos.eu.

[rishabh]

@mononym

Now the site is public (with some categories reserved for members but no approval required on signup). How to rejoin the pipeline to get listed in Discover ?

Done, and it looks like your site has been picked up now

[eisammy (Sammy)]

A quick question: why does Cloudflare’s Super Bot Fight always block the Discover bots? For some time now, whenever I need to enable this feature in CF, I get removed from Discover because the listing bot cannot access the instance’s .json info files.

[bartv (Bart)]

I updated my setting to be included a little over two weeks ago. Will we get any feedback if the listing is accepted or rejected?

[rishabh]

Hey Bart, can you confirm which site this is for?

[bartv (Bart)]

Sure thing: https://blenderartists.org

[pmusaraj (Penar Musaraj)]

It’s approved now and showing on Discover.