A new user, opalgeist, asked three questions about migrating a community to Discourse: the availability of a desktop client, disabling AI features, and recommended resources for new admins.
NateDhaliwal responded that there is no official desktop client, though PWAs and unofficial clients exist. Regarding AI features, he noted that on the free plan, some features may not be disableable, but suggested self-hosting is relatively easy and pointed to the official documentation.
awesomerobot clarified that while content scanning cannot be disabled on the free plan to prevent spam, other AI features are optional. They provided a specific URL filter to access these settings and emphasized that default AI models are hosted on Discourse servers, meaning data is not sent to third parties.
When opalgeist reported that automatically added AI bot users reappeared after deletion despite toggling features off, awesomerobot confirmed this is a known issue and linked to a related discussion regarding unwanted bots.
I’m thinking about moving my community to Discourse and have a few questions that I haven’t been able to easily find answers to, so I’m hoping this community can help me.
Does Discourse have a desktop client (like Discord)? I’ve seen that Discourse Hub is available for mobile.
Is there an easy way to turn off AI features in our community? I’ve seen others say that you can turn off the plugin, but mine is set to being toggled on and says it’s pre-installed and can’t be disabled?
I’m pretty tech-savvy but not to the point of self-hosting and all that stuff. Is there a place you’d recommend new Discourse admins look to get started with the platform?
If you are using the free plan, I don’t think you can disable it.
Self-hosting is pretty easy, actually. It’s mostly just a one-line install if you want the basic installation. Take a look at Documentation > Site Management and Documentation > Self-Hosting . If you have more specific queries, feel free to open a topic about it.
The best learning resource is undoubtedly the official documentation: Latest Documentation Topics - Discourse Meta. Additionally, you can check past related posts or simply post a question directly. Good luck.
Yes, this is true specifically for content scanning, we can’t allow the free plan to go unmonitored and become dominated by spam or illegal content.
All the other AI features on the free plan are optional. On a new free site, you can put this at the end of your https://example.discourse.group URL to quickly filter to a view that shows all of the relevant settings
It’s also worth noting that we host the models used by default, so your data isn’t being sent off to a third party AI company, it’s all processed on the same servers your content is already on.
@awesomerobot Thank you for this, that’s good to know! It looks like I managed to toggle everything off I was able to toggle. I guess the only other thing giving me pause is all the AI bot users that were automatically added to the site. With everything toggled off, can I get rid of these users? I tried to delete them, but they just re-appeared a few minutes later. It is good to know that the data isn’t being sent off to a third party AI company, I just prefer to have a forum space that’s as free of AI as possible! Thanks again, really appreciate the help and am looking forward to getting more acquainted with Discourse!
Yeah understandable on wanting to turn it off, I think there’s currently an issue with deleting those accounts… there’s some similar feedback in another topic: Unwanted bots , so it looks like something that we need to look into.
