Introducing Discover Hot Topics

News and Events Aankondigingen
1

If you are not familiar with Discourse Discover, check out this topic.

We recently added a cool, new feature to Discourse Discover: the ability to see recent hot topic discussions across Discourse communities in the subjects that matter to you. It’s a technically simple change but useful for a wide variety of audiences.

How does it work?

For sites included in Discover, we now run a crawler that pulls the latest most active topics, and we use a simple algorithm to group those topics by subject matter. There are Discourse communities about many subjects, and this gives the public a gateway to see what people are talking about in those subjects.

Cool, where can I see this?

This is available now in our iOS mobile app, DiscourseHub, and coming shortly to Android and the website at discover.discourse.com.

You can see a sneak preview in the following video and photos:

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Can I use this on my app/website

Yes, certainly. We have built this as a simple API that can be consumed by any client. You need to use these two endpoints:

  • https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics-tags.json → returns the subjects/tags to fetch in:
  • https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics.json?tag=<name>
    • The tag is required — there’s no “all tags” mode; anything else returns 400
    • you pass a page param to get more results – it is 0-index-based, Defaults to 0, maximum of 5 pages of results.
Example

Start by fetching the available tags:

λ  curl https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics-tags.json
{
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "finance",
    "apple",
    "automation",
    "media",
    "research",
    "smart-home",
    "linux",
    "open-source",
    "webdev",
    "health",
    "gaming",
    "audio",
    "devops",
    "crypto",
    "mapping",
    "technology",
    "support",
    "interests",
    "programming"
  ]
}

Then, pick one. For example, I’ll use ai and then pass it to our second endpoint:

curl "https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics.json?tag=ai"

Which will respond with something like:

"hot_topics": [
    {
      "id": 431863,
      "title": "Deepseek V4 released",
      "url": "https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/deepseek-v4-released/367696",
      "excerpt": "I think people with 4 DGX Spark are good to go.  Rest of us needs to wait for quantized version.",
      "like_count": 143,
      "reply_count": 76,
      "views": 5891,
      "score": 41.6296558464954,
      "image_url": null,
      "remote_created_at": "2026-04-24T03:21:32.475Z",
      "community_name": "NVIDIA Developer Forums",
      "community_url": "https://forums.developer.nvidia.com",
      "community_logo_url": "https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/discover/original/2X/b/bb908321f62e7dd8c9e87fb8750e242c2e4827d9.png"
    },
    {
      "id": 564616,
      "title": "Webhook URL shows localhost instead of domain (self-hosted n8n)",
      "url": "https://community.n8n.io/t/webhook-url-shows-localhost-instead-of-domain-self-hosted-n8n/292267",
      "excerpt": "Hello, \nI am trying to receive webhook events from Bitrix24 CRM in my self-hosted n8n. \nPreviously it worked on another cloud n8n account, but now on my current hosted instance the Webhook node generates URLs starting with localhost. \nWebhook method is currently set to GET. I also tested POST, but it still does not receive data. \nBecause of that, Bitrix24 does not seem to reach the webhook. \nIs it&hellip;",
      "like_count": 13,
      "reply_count": 8,
      "views": 32,
      "score": 41.1415045485148,
      "image_url": null,
      "remote_created_at": "2026-04-28T12:16:38.826Z",
      "community_name": "N8n Community",
      "community_url": "https://community.n8n.io",
      "community_logo_url": "https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/discover/original/2X/d/d34907e298b033e3eb94bcaff8fd8c82b1eb66e7.png"
    },
    // ...

You can then list the topics. The endpoints are updated throughout the day so that each subject has up-to-date results.

9 likes
4

Any chance the TestFlight build can be renewed?

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an iOS 26 style tab bar would also be a nice addition
1 like
5

That’s an old build track, expired in August 2025. The current production build is the latest one, it matches this TestFlight build: Join the Discourse Hub beta - TestFlight - Apple

Appreciate the nudge. It’s tricky to make only the tab bar be iOS 26 like and not update the rest of the app to match. And updating all of it is quite large in scope.

Curious what Apple will do with iOS 27, beta coming out in a few weeks. The glassy style of 26 didn’t go over too well.

2 likes
6

Thanks, I had to click twice, but on the second time the update button appeared.

All I know for sure is that they are removing the legacy iOS 18 keyboard style but the app seems to already use the 26 one. Anything else is just speculation, but I’ve always been a big fan of glass, I downloaded it the minute it became available and have always disagreed with the complaints people make about it because it looks fine to me. The tech debt is understandable though :slight_smile:

1 like
7

Well this is interesting timing given I’ve just spent the past week revamping a similar concept into my native app: a homescreen story rail that surfaces the most active discussions within a single community, pulling ranked content live from a custom plugin endpoint. Different scope to what you’ve built here (single community vs. cross-network discovery), but clearly the same underlying instinct. Keen to see how the API endpoints evolve.

2 likes