We’re planning to introduce a new versioning system for Discourse. Our goal is to provide more choice & predictability for community administrators, while maintaining our development velocity. We’re also adjusting some terminology to align better with other software. This document will evolve as we…

Today we’ve taken another step towards implementing this RFC - the latest version of Discourse is numbered as v2025.11.0, and we’ve now begun work on v2025.12.0-latest on the latest branch :tada: [image] Release v2025.11.0: AI translations improvements, chat search, new revi…

That’s pretty cool :+1: Do I understand correctly that there is no stable update to 3.5.3 now, possibly coincidentally?

Yeah, just a coincidence. We didn’t have any security fixes to release this month. Stable 3.5 is still fully supported

Hi, I used to use the beta tag and am now trying to update my scripts to use the new setup. Here’s how the repository looks as far as I can tell: * b541e99ea2 (origin/tests-passed, origin/main, origin/latest) DEV: Exclude new table in IntermediateDB config * 02dfb651ae DEV: Add support for convert…

Hi @simonk , thanks for raising those points! We’ve actually been discussing both those things today internally. The old beta and latest-release tags should be aliases of release release should be tracking the latest commit of release/2025.11 Working on getting that fixed up right now.

Those three tags have now been moved to the correct commit manually. Will make sure that the automated tooling is updated to keep them in the right place going forward. * commit 48167b94d63faf8a41b9c8193ec5dd3e4e9f498e (HEAD -> release/2025.11, tag: release, tag: latest-release, tag: beta, origin/r…

A production quirk. My self-hosted Discourse was still showing 3.6.0.beta2 as the most recent release. In the Admin Dashboard, the green smiley face indicated I was on the latest release, but in reality, I was two releases behind. I performed a manual update and am now on 2025.12.0-latest. Is the…

So this is probably because of the transition from one scheme to the new one, but yesterday 3.5.4 was released 3.5 is marked ESR and was released in August 2025 yesterday 2026.1 was released which is an ESR version [image] david: ESR versions remain supported for 2 releases after the next ESR…

[image] RGJ: this is probably because of the transition from one scheme to the new one Yeah that’s correct. Stable 3.5 doesn’t have its own branch in git, so continuing to support it after converting the stable branch to a tag is tricky. We did tag v3.5.4 (which includes the latest security f…

[image] david: 在您的 app.yml 文件中设置 version: release/v2026.02 我想知道这个具体的配置示例是什么样的？ env: DISCOURSE_VERSION: bd4e34ec04 还是 version: bd4e34ec04

RFC: A new versioning strategy for Discourse

Development

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) March 20, 2026, 7:40am 56

Hmm… does Understanding Discourse release channels need to be changed then?

Topic		Replies	Views
January 2026 Releases Announcements release-notes	15	1238	February 3, 2026
Stable branch compatibility with discourse_docker and plugins Self-hosting stable	37	2704	February 3, 2024
Enable updates only to a given release UX	28	3259	January 25, 2017
Is Discourse always in "beta"? Support	22	5944	May 9, 2023
Introducing releases.discourse.org Announcements	9	816	January 10, 2026

RFC: A new versioning strategy for Discourse

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