Is this large-scale update finally over?

[sniper756]

Relax a bit, let’s chat about something.

Is this round of large-scale updates finally over? The updates have been coming in rapidly these past few days, what version is this, what’s going on?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

What kinds of things are you referring to? Can you share a few examples?

[sniper756]

There are no issues currently, I just noticed the recent updates are very frequent. I really like this community.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

There’s often a bump in activity at the beginning of the year after short lull towards the end of the year when people often take time off.

We’ve got lots of things we want to improve, though, so in general we aim to keep delivering changes more or less continuously.

We often turn things on here first, so people who engaged can get a preview of our work in a real community.

When you see them on your own site depends on what how frequently you update your site, and what settings you turn on.

We’re actively working on two big projects to give admins more control over those things, though:

@lindsey

Upcoming changes admin area

Our new Upcoming Changes area will let you see what updates are coming to Discourse, opt-in to new experimental features, or temporarily opt-out if you need more time to prepare for these updates. This project will help minimize breakages on heavily customized sites and give admins more clarity on what changes are coming to their community.

Implementing a new versioning system

Last month we published our first release using the new versioning scheme: v2025.11. Over the coming weeks we’ll continue to improve the processes & documentation for this system, and intend to stamp the first “Extended Support Release” (ESR) in January. Learn more.

[sniper756]

Great, I just moved over from XenForo, and Discourse feels very vibrant.

[Moin]

@mcwumbly

There’s often a bump in activity at the beginning of the year after a short lull towards the end of the year when people often take time off.

I was about to post something similar. I had a look at Commits · discourse/discourse · GitHub because, to me, it didn’t feel like there was that much more activity.

I don’t think it’s any busier now than it was at the beginning of December. You can see the lower activity during and around the meetup in September and Christmas, and you can see the general increase in the summer after many plugins were integrated into the repository. Updates for these also count since then.

[sniper756]

@Moin

I don’t think it’s busier now than it was at the beginning of December. You can see the lower activity during the September meetup and during Christmas, and you can also see the overall growth after the summer due to many plugins being integrated into the codebase. Updates since then are also factored in.

Haha, I just arrived in December and happened to catch the update trough. It seems the current update frequency is normal. Thanks for your statistics chart.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Honestly, I feel like large scale change is only starting.

Looking at our repo though, nothing seems out of the ordinary.

Full Screen

There was a huge spike of code removal when we pushed mathjax out, except for that we are pushing on quite nicely.

[Ed_S]

Just to note, the most popular way to run Discourse - as far as I know - is to use the tests-passed version, but to update every time a release is declared, which is approximately monthly. Sometimes someone gets the idea that they need to update every time a change is committed - that’s not the case. Indeed, I find I can usually skip one or two releases without great penalty - just keeping an eye on security fixes.

The view of a contributor, of changes committed, is quite different from the view of an admin.

[nat (Natalie T)]

@sniper756

I just arrived in December

Welcome to Discourse! You’ll get used to the update frequency quickly.

If you like, you can check out the Announcements category.