Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Admin config pages for site appearance
We’re just about to shift from design to development on some of the improvements we’ve been designing in areas related to site appearance to make it easier for admins to configure the look and feel of their sites. Our current plans include adding support for dark mode and light mode into individual color palettes, having each theme own its own color palette, and update pages for choosing and configuring themes and components. We’re also working on a new branding page focused on a simpler UI for adding logos, selecting fonts, and color palettes.
A new theme focused on ease of use
We are beginning to design a new theme, which we intend to make the default theme for all new communities, that is specifically designed with ease of use in mind. Our goal is to create a beautiful out-of-the-box experience for Discourse, particularly for those without the resources, know-how, or patience for in-depth site appearance customizations.
In full swing
One-click spam detector
We now offer a one-click spam detector available in the AI plugin settings. It helps identify potential spam using LLMs and flags it for site moderators to inspect in the review queue. As an admin, if you want to use a Discourse hosted open-weights LLM for this feature, simply enable it from the What’s New section. We’ve also been making some targeted improvements to the review queue to take advantage of these features and are in the early stages of discussing a more focused effort on improvements there.
Support for multiple drafts
We are in the middle of this project to make it easier to write and respond to topics in your community. We’re beginning with updates to make it easier to access your existing drafts through the New Topic button, and will soon be touching up the Drafts list before finalizing support for multiple drafts.
Composer redesign
We’re in the middle of internal testing for our redesigned, rich text editor to ensure it supports basic formatting and features. Next, we’ll be working on updating the composer toolbar and then we will continue our testing here on Meta and with a select beta group of customers.
Admin interface design consistency
We made significant progress in the past month in making the admin UI more consistent. We still have more planned here, but if you haven’t spent time browsing around in the admin UI recently, take it for a spin and let us know if anything pops out as being inconsistent.
More tools for legal compliance
In light of new legislation for online platforms, such as the Digital Services Act, we are providing more tools for admins to ensure their sites are compliant with these laws. These will largely be optional new settings that will be available to all sites.
Post menu, topic-list and icon upgrades
Our work on these behind-the-scenes projects is nearing completion. Most communities have been automatically switched to the new implementations. If you see any warning banners about incompatible customisations, then please take a look at the relevant topic for the topic list, the post menu, or the fontawesome upgrade.
Wrapping up
Instant plan upgrades on hosting
For sites on our hosting, it’s now possible to instantly upgrade your plan from your admin dashboard, so you don’t need to wait if you run into a feature that you need but which is not available on your current plan. Of course, we’re still here to help if you want to discuss any plan changes, so you can always reach out to our support team at team@discourse.org anytime with any questions about your site or your plan.
Adding one-click unsubscribes for community emails
We’ve added support for one-click / easy unsubscribing from emails sent from Discourse communities so we can comply with recent Google and Yahoo requirements. Making it easier for uninterested users to unsubscribe from emails protects overall email deliverability, since those users are then less likely to report unwanted email as spam.
Improved setup wizard for new sites
We have worked through some incremental improvements to the setup wizard, making the options clearer, and steps ordered more naturally. The preview pane and font previews have also been updated to make setting up your site’s design more intuitive.
New developer toolbar
We’ve introduced a new developer toolbar that can be accessed when running Discourse in development mode to provide one-click access to commonly needed developer tools like the ability to see locations of plugin outlets and to toggle on and off safe mode and verbose localization.