Hey guys, this is kind of an odd one, but here it is:
Since we’re a tech forum, we kinda know our way a little around Discourse plugins — at least enough to be dangerous…
Over time we ended up with a lot of separate plugins, and at some point it started getting confusing to manage them all. So we merged everything into one big plugin while still keeping it organized, modular, and properly separated internally.
Dumbcourse came along for the ride too.
So here’s what’s currently inside:
JTech Tools
One bundled Discourse plugin, 9 modules, and every module has its own on/off switch.
-
Dislike / Phantom Reactions
In selected categories, likes basically become phantom likes. They don’t count or show normally, they’re hidden from history, removed from leaderboards, and related notifications get automatically cleaned up. There’s also an optional group allowlist, audit trail, and purge job. -
Another SMTP
Lets you configure an alternate outbound mail relay with its own server, port, TLS/auth settings, optional from-domain rewriting, and custom timeouts. -
Mini-mod
Gives category group moderators some additional moderation abilities, such as creating/editing categories, editing/moving topics, etc. Every permission has its own toggle, with restrictions around TL4-level abilities. -
Mod Tooling / Mod Categories
This is a bigger collection of staff tools, including:-
Moderator whispers / targeted replies
-
Private topic notes with reply threads
-
Staff-event notifications for things like deleted posts, approved/rejected queued posts, user notes, flag notes, etc.
-
A dedicated shield-tab event feed
-
Topic tools such as pins, prompts, footer messages, and reply approval
-
Targeted and first-post checklists
-
Badge/group PM targeting
-
Topic-prompt checklists
-
-
Dumbcourse
A stripped-down SPA frontend for the forum at/dumb.It includes hCaptcha, its own push/SSE/ntfy notification endpoints, a LanguageTool proxy, reactions, and custom emoji bridged from the main forum.
-
Translator Tweaks
Some patches and behavior changes for the official translator plugin, including foreign-language detection backfill and a few other tweaks. -
Smart Search
Uses WordNet + tech-jargon synonym expansion when a search returns too few results.It all runs in-process with no external service, and if anything goes wrong it simply falls back to normal Discourse search.
-
Desktop Pop-up Notifications
Jelly-style toast notifications for new forum notifications. Desktop only, per-user opt-in, with a configurable timeout. -
Disteleplus
This one grew into a whole thing.It’s a native single-room team chat inside Discourse, available through a drawer or full-page interface, with:
-
Reactions
-
Replies
-
Voice notes
-
Search
-
Encryption at rest
-
Typing indicators
-
Mentions
-
Link previews
It’s bridged two-way with Telegram and also supports forum-post announcements and a forum-upload archive.
We originally made this because not all of our staff had or wanted WhatsApp, and not everyone had Telegram either. So the solution became: Telegram + a Telegram-like UI directly inside the forum, with both sides synced.
-
Every single feature has its own settings section and can be switched off independently.
So yeah, it’s kind of a package deal — but I think most of these features are useful enough that other communities might as well get some use out of them too.
If someone wants to split individual modules into separate plugins, fork them, or maintain their own versions, go right ahead.
We’re obviously still maintaining the main plugin ourselves, but we’re not pretending we’re the world’s most professional Discourse plugin developers either, A fair amount of AI was used while building this, so expect bugs/slop, weird edge cases, and probably some questionable decisions here and there.
Contributions, fixes, cleanup, and improvements are very welcome.
Hopefully you guys will forgive the slightly insane approach of putting all of this into one plugin.
And of course, credit to all the JTech members who have contributed to it so far.