Current Projects - March 2026

Current Projects - Month 2026

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

Your questions and feedback are welcome!

Recently finished

Blog post styling component improvements

Blog post styling is now an official Discourse component! This component lets you make topics that look more like blog posts with large hero images, emphasis on the topic author, optional summaries, and special styling on replies to more closely resemble traditional blog comments. Learn more.

Increased Discourse AI hosted limits

Thanks to improvements and optimizations to the underlying models that make them more efficient for us to host, we’ve increased the daily allowed AI credits across our official hosting:

  • Free: 30K → 100K

  • Starter: 50K → 200K

  • Pro: 100K → 500K

  • Business: 250K → 1M

  • Enterprise: 600K → 3M

Three improvements to AI Agents: tool token counter, new moderation tools, and human-in-the-loop review

Note: We’ve renamed our Personas feature to AI Agents to align with industry-standard language.

Tool token counter. We’ve added an informational token counter to help visualize the cost of currently selected tools so that you can make informed decisions about which tools to enable on the agent. We made this addition after noticing that customers sometimes create custom agents with costly tools that aren’t necessary for their application.

New moderation tools. We added 13 new tools focused on moderation which you can use to power automations in your community: CloseTopic, UnlistTopic, LockPost, DeleteTopic, EditPost, EditTags, EditCategory, SetTopicTimer, SetSlowMode, MovePosts, GrantBadge, Assign, and MarkAsSolved.

Human-in-the-loop review. The new tools listed above come with the ability to optionally redirect any of the associated actions (e.g., closing a topic, editing tags, etc.) to the review queue. When enabled, any actions requested by agents — typically via automation — will create a new entry in the review queue for your moderation team to triage, approve, or deny.

Wrapping up

Improvements to the Solved plugin setup

As part of our continued focus on category setup and the Solved plugin, we’re working on improvements to make it easy to create support categories where members can ask and answer each others’ questions. Learn more.

New compiler for plugin JavaScript

Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a new compilation system for plugins. Much of the implementation is shared with the theme compiler, and makes use of modern browser technologies like native ES modules and import-maps for improved performance and developer experience. Learn more

In full swing

Implementing a new versioning system

We made our second release and first ESR release using the new versioning system, and are continuing to make improvements to our release processes. We’ve wrapped up the new theme/plugin compatibility workflows, and will be updating documentation soon. We’re also in the advanced stages of building workflows to allow security-fix releases between scheduled monthly releases. Learn more.

New layout and blocks system for theme customizations

We merged an initial experimental version of a new system for theme developers to define the layout for inserting custom blocks of content into any page. We’re continuing work on refining and documenting it before marking the API as ready for general use. Stay tuned for more details!

Reporting and analytics improvements

We’re improving our reporting and analytics tools so it’s easier to evaluate your community’s health, make decisions based on those findings, and share the value of your community with others in your organization. We’ve started with general improvements and pruning our existing reports, and are now working on designing a new dashboard to make the information you need more accessible and easier to interpret.

Improvements to the Free plan experience

After announcing the Free plan last month, we’re focusing on improving the admin experience by fixing reported issues (free-plan) and aligning it with our recent brand refresh.

Kicking off

Improvements to Topic Voting plugin setup

Similar to our work above with the Solved plugin, we’re now exploring how to make it easier to create ideas or feature request categories with the Topic Voting plugin. More coming soon!

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Are there plans for adding it to Crowdin, or should translations be added via pull request?