Current Projects - October 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
Upcoming changes admin area
We are kicking off an exciting project to give admins a better overview of the work we’re doing in Discourse. It’s early days on this work, but we believe these changes will help minimize breakages on heavily customized sites and give admins more clarity on what changes are coming to their community.
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. We’re working to add support for this feature to our new rich text editor so that users of the new composer can benefit from it.
In full swing
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.
Updating our lightbox to improve image viewing
We’re testing our updated lightbox functionality to improve the experience of viewing images and related files on Discourse. So far, it’s looking promising! After we complete this testing, we’ll proceed with implementing it in all Discourse communities.
Improvements to 2FA input fields
The two-factor authentication interface is receiving improvements so that it’s easier for members to enter these codes manually or with a password manager. This will help members keep their accounts secure, while also supporting a smooth login experience.
Automatic AI Search
Now that Discourse supports multi-lingual, typo-tolerant, fast, and privacy-preserving semantic search, we want to leverage it to help members to find what they’re looking for. When this work is complete, we’ll automatically show AI Search results when there are no other results (on fullscreen search) or too few results (in the header search).
Improvements to Discourse ID
After announcing the Discourse ID service for all Discourse sites, we’re improving the site registration flow and 2FA experience for admins and members. Thanks to everyone who has enabled it on their Discourse sites already, as we’re closely monitoring feedback on Meta!
Review queue refresh
The review queue in Discourse is currently receiving an extensive makeover to make a smoother moderator experience by making moderator actions more consistent, separating actions for users and content, supporting moderator notes, adding timelines for reviewables, and more.
Introducing 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.
Wrapping up
Chat search
A new chat search feature is coming soon to Discourse! We are putting the finishing touches on this feature, which makes it possible to search your chat channels, group chats, and DMs for past conversations.
Easier PM member management
It will soon be easier to add and remove members from a PM. We’re giving this part of the user experience some attention so that there are fewer clicks required to bring members into your PMs and it’s clearer when you’ve invited someone who isn’t yet a member of the community.
Deprecating Search Banner
We have completed our improvements to the core welcome banner and are preparing a script to help migrate customers using the Search Banner theme component to the core feature. This will let us finalize the deprecation of the component in favor of the core feature.
Better AI semantic search results
Every AI feature that is backed by our embedding vectors just got a lot better thanks to new features that landed in pgvector 0.8.0. This will make Related Topics, AI Search, AI Bot RAG, AI Bot Search, Search Discoveries, and AI Helper category / tag suggestions much more reliable.
Support for Onebox and lightbox on translated posts
Translated posts now support both oneboxes and lightboxes so that they will look and feel more like their original versions. This will help translated posts feel more seamless with the rest of the community’s posts.
Dynamic color palette management
We recently finished work on improving our color palette system. These updates are available in your Discourse site today, and together result in a streamlined process for implementing and managing your site’s colors.
Rendering modernization
Our long-term project to modernize the rendering technology of Discourse is now reaching an end, with the final deprecations now in place. From this week, all sites will start using the new implementation, regardless of theme/plugin readiness. Any sites that aren’t ready yet will see a warning banner with a link to the post stream update docs, or the more general widget docs.
Update to Emojis Unicode 17.0
We have updated Discourse emojis to emojis unicode 17.0, which includes some new emojis such as the compelling and important 
. Happy emoting, everyone!