How Discourse Uses Discourse

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The discussion explores how Discourse, a 100% remote company, uses its own platform internally to manage all aspects of operations, from communication to documentation. blake explains that their private Discourse instance functions as a living knowledge base, where institutional knowledge emerges organically through daily conversations, tagging, and topic updates. This approach keeps information current and accessible, with examples like the frequently updated “Coding Lore” topic. jlc references a 2018 article by HAWK on the same topic and asks about differences in practices, such as the use of the Discourse Assign plugin. hellekin appreciates the update and notes similarities with their own team’s use of Discourse, highlighting the value of shared experiences for remote teams.

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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. I genuinely believe our culture and success as a 100% remote company stems from using our own collaboration tool, and I want to share how we use Discourse to build Discourse so you can create a similar setup for your team.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/11/how-discourse-uses-discourse
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In case it’s useful as a reference, in 2018 @HAWK published an earlier article on the same subject. I find both of these articles very inspiring!

I have a few little questions about differences between what you each emphasized. Are you all still using the Discourse Assign plugin to manage task assignments? Do you still use topic timers to help manage topic status once tasks are complete? Are you still using Discourse as a private email support portal? If you’ve moved away from these strategies, would you be willing to sketch your reasoning?

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Hey John, thanks! Yes, I’m pleased to say that we do still use all those things!

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Thank you @blake for this very welcome update on Discourse’s internal use!

Like for @HAWK’s post seven years ago, I translated it so French readers can also learn from your experience:

There are some similarities with how we use Discourse at petites singularités but you seem to use @staff a lot more. In our case, we have few people with access to #staff but more categories with group moderation.

I was surprised to read about the incident response: does that mean you actually open at least three topics for the same incident? It seems to follow the Product/Todo split though.

A follow-up question maybe. Since you’re hosting quite a lot of free software project forums, do you ever share runbooks with them, or get inspired by some of them?

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