Hi all, 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? Thanks for the help!

[image] opalgeist: Does Discourse have a desktop client (like Discord)? I’ve seen that Discourse Hub is available for mobile. No, there isn’t an official one. You can use a PWA as a desktop client. There are unofficial ones like A Social Mobile & Desktop Client for Communities (2). [image] opalgeist: 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? If you are using the free plan, I don’t think you can disable it. [image] opalgeist: 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? Self-hosting is pretty easy, actually. It’s mostly just a one-line install if you want the basic installation. Take a look at #site-management and #self-hosting . If you have more specific queries, feel free to open a topic about it.

最好的学习资源无疑是官方文档：最新文档话题 - Discourse Meta，另外就是查看历史相关的帖子，最后还可以直接发帖询问。祝你顺利。

@NateDhaliwal This is great info, thank you so much! I appreciate it. :slight_smile: @singi2016cn Ah, thank you! That helps a bunch. Have a good one!

[image] NateDhaliwal: If you are using the free plan, I don’t think you can disable it. 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 /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=any:ai_embeddings_semantic_quick_search_enabled|ai_embeddings_semantic_search_enabled|ai_embeddings_semantic_related_topics_enabled|ai_embeddings_enabled|ai_summarization_enabled|ai_ask_ai_enabled|ai_helper_enabled [image] 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! [image]

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.

New Discourse User - a few questions

Product Support

opalgeist (Opalgeist) October 19, 2026, 1:37am 4

@NateDhaliwal This is great info, thank you so much! I appreciate it.

@singi2016cn Ah, thank you! That helps a bunch.

Have a good one!

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