Current Projects - September 2025
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. With our recent annual meetup in Prague, this was a slightly quieter month than usual, but there are still some exciting projects to report on.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Simplified topics list
We’ve been testing improvements to the New and Unread topics lists by combining them into a single view, with subviews for new topics (New) and topics with new replies (Unread). We’re preparing to make this view the default for new communities. Existing communities can implement this functionality today via the experimental_new_new_view_groups setting, and you can demo it today on Meta by joining the testing group.
Introducing a new versioning system
We’re planning to introduce a new versioning system for Discourse. Our goal is 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.
In full swing
Review queue refresh
The review queue in Discourse is currently receiving an extensive makeover. While this work is still heavily in-development, some of the standout features are consistent moderation actions, separate actions for users and content, moderator notes, reviewable timelines, a smoother moderator experience, and much more. The initial features will be available for beta testing soon.
Updating our lightbox to improve image viewing
We’re working on a proof of concept for an updated lightbox functionality to improve the experience of viewing images and related files on Discourse. We’ll be testing among our team to make sure it meets our needs before proceeding with implementation.
Discovery: AI Conversation Search
After shipping an experimental version of conversational search results powered by Discourse AI, we are polishing the feature to get it ready for prime time in all Discourse instances.
Wrapping up
Improving our welcome banner feature
We are finishing up our improvements to the welcome banner and will soon proceed with migrating users on the Search Banner theme component over to the core feature.
Dynamic color palette management
We’ve been hard at work improving our color palette system by making it easier to implement your brand’s colors, simplifying the management of different palettes, and separating light and dark mode palettes for more robust dark mode support. These updates are available in your Discourse site today, and together result in a streamlined process for implementing and managing your site’s colors.
AI translations: admin dashboard improvements
We are adding the finishing touches to our translation progress admin dashboard, including a simplified UX, dark mode compatibility, and improvements to page performance.
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. The vast majority of sites are already using the new implementation. Any sites that aren’t ready yet will see warning banner with a link to the post stream update docs, or the more general widget docs.
Bringing Discourse ID to self-hosters
We recently enabled the new Discourse ID service on Meta and wrote about how it works and have now made registration available for self-hosted sites! We’re continuing to ship improvements to this service.
