Current Projects - November 2025
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Email improvements
Emails are an important part of how members connect and reconnect with your community. We’re kicking off some 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 beginning a project around simplifying category setup to make it easier to expand your existing community or start a new one. This work includes streamlining the creation of 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.).
Content localization for tags
After shipping content localization for posts, topics, categories, and search results, we now are working on making tags fully localizable. Given how tags work with a very lightweight representation on Discourse, we will need to do a big overhaul on their functionality, including adding support for IDs and slugs, much like categories, before we reach the end goal of localization.
In full swing
Upcoming changes admin area
We’re working on a new feature that will give admins an overview of the work we’re doing in Discourse. This feature lets folks opt-in to new features early or temporarily opt-out if additional work is needed to make the new features compatible with your site’s specific customizations. This project will help minimize breakages on heavily customized sites and give admins more clarity on what changes are coming to their community.
Simplified topics list
We are simplifying the topic list for new communities by combining the New and Unread topic lists into a single view. Existing communities can opt into this functionality today by enabling the experimental_new_new_view_groups setting, and you can demo it today on Meta by joining the testing group.
Review queue moderator action improvements
We’re hard at work rebuilding the moderator actions in the review queue. These new actions will be more consistent, flexible, and powerful, giving moderators greater control over how they handle flags.
Implementing a new versioning system
We’re continuing work on a new versioning system for Discourse to provide more choice and predictability for community administrators, while maintaining our development velocity. We’re also adjusting some terminology to align better with other software. For more information, check out the RFC.
Improvements to Discourse ID
After announcing the Discourse ID service for all Discourse sites, we’re now improving the site registration and 2FA flows along with an improved user experience that includes various design enhancements. Thanks to everyone who has enabled it on their Discourse sites already, as we’re closely monitoring feedback and bug reports on Meta!
Daily credits for LLMs
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 are planning to roll out daily credits to it, so you get a number of tokens per day that scale with your hosting plan.
Wrapping up
AI summaries, search, and helper enabled by default
We’ve enabled AI summaries, search, and helper by default for communities on our hosting. This removes the burden of configuring these features, but still gives you full control over disabling or changing their access levels.
Updating our lightbox to improve image viewing
We’ve rolled out our new lightbox functionality and made a few quick fixes / polishing updates based on your feedback. We’re wrapping this project up by making plans to remove the old lightbox functionality from the app.
Deprecating Search Banner component
We’ve finished the migration script that will move communities from Search Banner to welcome banner, which is now available to self-hosters. We are in the process of migrating customers on our hosting; customers who will be impacted by the migration will receive an email from us about the migration timing.
Review queue layout improvements
We recently shipped a new interface for the review queue that improves the moderation experience on Discourse. The update brings a more user-friendly layout, along with new features like a timeline, notes, additional data, and more.
Image grid support in the rich text editor
When you’re adding multiple images to a post, the image grid lets you organize them into an attractive grid, which takes up less space than adding one image per row. This feature should be landing quite soon to the new rich text editor.
Improvements to 2FA input fields
We’ve wrapped up the new and improved two-factor authentication interface, which has made it easier and faster for members to enter these codes manually or with a password manager.
Rendering modernization
Our long-term project to modernize the rendering technology of Discourse is now reaching an end. Deprecation warning banners have now been in place for some time, and the default behaviour was switched to use the new system by default. This month we’ll remove the old ‘widget’ rendering system, which means all of Discourse will be using the same rendering system.