Current Projects - December 2025
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Wrapping up
Celebrate 2025 with Discourse Rewind!
Our team is excited to share Rewind, a fun way for members to celebrate the past year in the community. You may have noticed this already on Meta, and now you can enable it in your community, too! Learn more.
Chat channel starring
You can now star your favorite or most important chat channels, group chats, or direct messages to move them to a dedicated section of your sidebar / mobile app for easy access. Learn more.
Github PR status live updates
We have added support for live updates to Github pull request oneboxes so you can see the live status (approved, merged, closed, etc.) and more easily keep tabs on your organization’s work. Learn more.
Rendering modernization
Our long-term project to modernize the rendering technology of Discourse is now complete. The old ‘widget’ and ‘raw handlebars’ systems are now completely removed. Thanks to all the theme and plugin developers who helped to move the ecosystem through these changes!
Review queue moderator action improvements
We’re finishing our project to rebuild moderator actions to be more consistent and flexible. Once we have finished testing internally, we’ll make these new actions available for admins to test in their communities before shipping globally.
All AI features now available out-of-the-box on our hosting
We recently made all the features that rely on LLMs work out-of-the-box in our hosting by providing a CDCK Hosted LLM. To ensure its availability and steady performance for all customers, we have established daily credits for each plan, which you can see in the admin interface. As your community scales, you can decide whether to upgrade your plan, fine-tune different features to remain within your current plan limits, or switch to a third-party provider. Learn more.
In full swing
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.
Tags and content localization
After shipping content localization for posts, topics, categories, and search results, we now are working on making tags fully localizable. As part of that, we will also be making improvements to tag management.
Kicking off
Email improvements
Emails are an important part of how members connect and reconnect with your community. We’re beginning work to tidy up the default email subject lines, improve the “From” name and avatar presentation, and support customizable inbox previews.
Category improvements
We are in the planning stages for a project to simplify category setup through use-case based categories, such as those for questions / answers, feature ideas, and documentation. In parallel, we will polish the end user experience for these categories types and their associated plugins (e.g., Solved, Topic Voting, Docs Categories, etc.).
Setting up new Discourse instances without email setup
Thanks to our recent work on Discourse ID, we can now simplify the new site setup for self-hosters. We are working on a new site flow that skips the complicated email setup in favour of Discourse ID. This makes it easier to test a Discourse instance before completing the full email setup (which will be needed eventually for proper notifications).