Current Projects - April 2025

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly-ish newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.

We’ve been busy! I missed a month, so there’s more time to cover and a lot going on, so let’s dig in.

Your questions and feedback are welcome!

Kicking off

Exploring simpler authentication

We are in the early stages of exploring offering a centralized authentication service that would allow admins to effortlessly support multiple login methods and for end users to easily authenticate themselves on multiple Discourse sites.

Exploring a new conversational search experience

We are exploring ways to help people explore the knowledge created by communities by augmenting search with a new conversational experience powered by AI. While we have an initial version of this enabled on meta, it’s still early days. Learn more…

In full swing

Horizon, our new theme focused on ease of use

Horizon, our newest theme, is now available on Meta so members can try it out and share their feedback. Horizon is designed for communities that want a beautiful, easy-to-use community, but don’t have the resources to develop a custom theme. We’re addressing the feedback that’s now flowing in and getting ready to launch an in-depth beta program with interested communities. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please take a look and let us know what you think! Learn more…

Our new composer

You can try our new composer, which offers a rich text editing experience, here on Meta alongside our traditional markdown composer. We’re grateful to everyone who has provided their support and shared suggestions for improvements. This feedback is helping us prepare to make the composer more readily available on our hosting so that more communities can benefit from the easier writing experience. In the meantime, we encourage you to keep testing here and sharing your feedback. Learn more…

Site appearance configuration

We’re continuing to make improvements focused on enabling admins to more easily configure the appearance of their site, including new pages for installing and configuring themes and theme components, selecting fonts, adding logos, and editing what color palettes are available. We thought we were ready to ship an initial version of some of this work, and rolled some of it out earlier, but then rolled it back based on the early feedback we received. So we’re hard at work getting it to a state where we can get it back in front of you and iterate together.

A new multilingual experience

We are working on new translation features that will enable an entirely new experience for multilingual communities. We are working towards an initial version that is ready for wider feedback, but there’s a lot to figure out while we’re exploring what’s possible now with LLMs, what belongs in the Discourse Translator plugin, and what belongs in core. Stay tuned!

Review queue improvements

We have been making small improvements to the review queue while doing some research to inform an updated design. We’re now ready to begin working towards a new design that we think will help moderators more effectively handle items in the review queue. Learn more…

Ability to configure personas for all AI features

We’re working on updating all AI features so that they are backed by configurable personas. This will enable admins to further tune these features to the needs of their community with custom prompts and tools.

Topic Page rendering modernization

As part of our frontend-rendering modernization project, we’ll be starting to tackle the topic page. This will bring an improved developer experience, and new extensibility options for plugin and theme authors. As the project progresses, we’ll be posting on Meta about any required theme/plugin changes.

Deprecating support for iOS 15 and other older browsers

We are deprecating support for iOS 15 and some older browsers because they lack support for modern browser features that we plan to leverage in our ongoing modernization efforts. People using these browsers will see a warning informing them of the deprecation that links to a topic with more details. Learn more…

Wrapping up

Header search, welcome banner, and category icons and emojis

To make it easier to customize your community’s appearance, we’ve added some new features inspired by popular theme components. In addition to improved ease of use, this also reduces compatibility issues with site themes. These features are available through simple site settings, or category-level settings for icons / emoji. Learn more…

Sentiment analysis dashboard

We shipped an initial version of a new sentiment analysis dashboard, and then made some additional tweaks based on initial feedback. We think there’s plenty more to do here in the future, and we’ll continue to make small iterations but pausing our focused efforts in this space for now while we make space to learn more from real world usage. Learn more…

Enabling moderation of group chats

In order to continue to foster safe and healthy communities, we’ve added features to allow admins to moderate group chats. Learn more…

Comprehensive admin search

We’ve introduced a new comprehensive admin search feature to enable admins to search all the things in the admin interface, including pages, site settings, themes and components, and reports. Admin search is available via a sidebar link in the admin interface and with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/⌘+/. Learn more…

Replacing Akismet with AI spam detection

We’ve rolled out AI spam detection as the default spam detection and prevention feature on most of our hosting. With this new method, we are seeing more effective spam detection, and have greater control to intervene and improve it. We now recommend it for all sites as a more effective way than Akismet to detect spam. Learn more…

Other developer news

We’ve made a few announcements in the past month about upcoming changes that will impact theme developers, including our plans to move to JS native-class syntax for themes and plugins, and our plans to remove support for template overrides and mobile-specific style sheets. See the latest topics tagged with dev-news for more information. Learn more…

[Mittens]

@mcwumbly

Review queue improvements

We have been making small improvements to the review queue while doing some research to inform an updated design. We’re now ready to begin working towards a new design that we think will help moderators more effectively handle items in the review queue. Learn more…

finally, I hope it is easier.

[jimkleiber]

@mcwumbly

Exploring simpler authentication

We are in the early stages of exploring offering a centralized authentication service that would allow admins to effortlessly support multiple login methods and for end users to easily authenticate themselves on multiple Discourse sites.

I’ll put in a strong vote for www.hello.coop, a solution that I use on my Discourse forums that allows users to choose whichever type of login they’d like, from phone number to email to social logins and maybe even passkey.

And once someone has a Hellō account, they can login to any Discourse site that uses it.

Maybe the only difference would be that each of my Discourse communities would still require the user to answer community-specific questions when initially signing in.

The founder is Dick Hardt, who has done a lot of work on the OIDC spec, I believe.

Anyways, maybe something to explore. I’d love to answer any questions and I know Dick and I’m sure he would as well.

[lennylo (Lenny Loling)]

@jimkleiber

I’ll put in a strong vote for www.hello.coop here, a solution that I use on my Discourse forums that allows users to choose whichever type of login they’d like, from phone number to email to social logins and maybe even passkey.

And once someone has a Hellō account, they can login to any Discourse site that uses it.

Maybe the only difference would be that each of my Discourse communities would still require the user to answer community-specific questions when initially signing in.

The founder is Dick Hardt, who has done a lot of work on the OIDC spec, I believe.

Anyways, maybe something to explore. I’d love to answer any questions and I know Dick and I’m sure he would as well.

How difficult is it to integrate Helloō with the existing Discourse community?

[jimkleiber]

Was super easy. I can put a quick tutorial together if necessary but it basically is just an OIDC provider.

[SubStrider]

I used horizon a little while back and I was disappointed with how it was turning out. But I tried it again today and it looks amazing now. This ends up solving my biggest peeve with Discourse. This and the new composer together are phenomenal.

[UlBre]

@mcwumbly

Eine neue mehrsprachige Erfahrung

Wir arbeiten an neuen Übersetzungsfunktionen, die eine völlig neue Erfahrung für mehrsprachige Gemeinschaften ermöglichen werden. Wir arbeiten an einer ersten Version, die bereit für breiteres Feedback ist, aber es gibt noch viel zu klären, während wir erkunden, was jetzt mit LLMs möglich ist, was in das Discourse Translator-Plugin gehört und was zum Kern gehört. Bleiben Sie dran!

Klasse, das erwarte ich sehnsüchtig

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Stay tuned and you may notice a few things silently rolling out here on meta

[Arkshine]

It’s really impressive, I didn’t even notice at first that it was translated! It’s a must-have feature and a game-changer for multilingual communities.

[MiikkaLaitila]

@mcwumbly

Stay tuned and you may notice a few things silently rolling out here on meta

That is really cool and much needed! Here’s a one eager beta tester if you want to get more feedback at some point

[cogdog (Alan Levine)]

The multilanguage experience is of keen interest for our global education community, raising a hand to for testing.

I flipped my setting to Italian, and did see a few interface elements change, will it ultimately do everything??

Also, for our basic users, navigating to the setting is quite a path to find profile - settings - interface. I know discourse well, and I repeatedly forgot to click the save button at the bottom.

I’d vote for a more main interface location for choosing language (although I accept for most people, it’s a set one time act).

Le caratteristiche del Discourse lo fanno elevare al di sopra di tutto il resto! (I am not fluent I only speak Italian with translation tools)

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@cogdog

will it ultimately do everything?

Yes, I believe that is the goal, perhaps with some small exceptions if certain things are significantly more difficult than others. But it’ll take some time to get there!

@cogdog

I’d vote for a more main interface location for choosing language (although I accept for most people, it’s a set one time act).

For users who aren’t logged in, our aim is to use their browser’s locale (sent via a request header if I understand correctly).

For logged in users, it’d use the preference, but I believe that’s set by default based on the browser locale as well when an account is first created.

Do you see any obvious gaps with that logic?

@cogdog

I know discourse well, and I repeatedly forgot to click the save button at the bottom.

Incidentally, we are looking at improvements to how user preferences are saved more generally as well.

[piffy]

Is there any intention to make the translated version indexable on search engines in other languages? For example, my site is like 99.9% English but in theory could have a large Japanese audience. But that’s unlikely to happen unless it’s also discoverable in search engines in Japanese. Would be of great benefit for us and probably many other sites in similar positions.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@piffy

Is there any intention to make the translated version indexable on search engines in other languages?

Yes, this is certainly something we are thinking about.

[piffy]

It’s hard to overstate how valuable that would be in our case. That said, when I experimented with the Discourse Translator plugin in the past, I found it to be extremely expensive to operate, like nearly $15/day and it barely scratched the backlog of all posts before I gave up on it. So hopefully the newer approach is far more cost-effective.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@piffy

extremely expensive to operate, like nearly $15/day

The commoditization of large language models is a game changer here and a bit catalyst for us embarking on this adventure.

GPT 4.1 mini comes in at 1.6 dollars for about half a million words translated.
Gemini 2.5 Flash comes in at 60 cents for the same story

Browsing through https://openrouter.ai/ you can find many other capable models that come at even cheaper (or free) price points.

As the days pass, the capabilities are going up and price is going down.

With the old translation services, we saw a very high price that barely moved for a decade.

[cogdog (Alan Levine)]

Thanks Dave, the logic of matching language to the browser locale is logical, cant think of a general reason to change languages (mine is just curious to see the content in other languages). It seems to be very fluid/quick.