We’re introducing a feature that displays a ‘Powered by Discourse’ graphic, linking to discourse.org, when enabled. This graphic will be displayed at the bottom of most pages and to see it in action, you can look for it here on Meta!
As part of our introductory rollout, only communities who receive free hosting services from us will have the graphic displayed by default.
To display the graphic on your site, look for the new ‘enable_powered_by_discourse’ site setting.
This will be great to raise more awareness about Discourse for users on the tens of thousands of sites that use it!
You might want to consider making that rel="nofollow" , I’ve seen sites getting penalized for less. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?sjid=3667708044990156395-EU#link-spam
Looks cool! Maybe on hover make it so the discourse logo also becomes color instead of only the boarder.
This is very cool!
Our HTML view has had this for quite a while and it did not have the rel nofollow.
Not strictly against adding changing this, but google should be quite aware of this by now.
Agreed!
Great move Discourse team 
Just enabled this on our Discourse - it’s the least we can do in order to try and give something back 
And end users need that awareness for what? As much they need similar powered by WordPress notifications?
Lol I guess I am just one of those kinds of end users – I used Discourse just as a user on another forum, before I found out more about it through the links about trust levels and so on through the badges. That was way back in 2015. Now I really love Discourse, try to host it myself and recommend it.
I mean Ghost is also open source software (for blogging) that also has “Powered by Ghost” on its themes. I saw Coding Horror use Ghost before I used it too for my own blogs. I think it helps.
Because with centralised software, like Discord being the popular example of the day, everyone signs up to Discord when they sign up for someone else’s server, and they still use the same account if they want to set up their own community. Same with Facebook before that and stuff.
But with open source software, it’s decentralised. So even if you browse one place that uses the software, it has no links to other places that also use the same software. So you might not know what is actually behind the awesome site you are using. I think the small notice helps in that regard.
There have been times when I really like a website’s design and scrolled to the bottom of a webpage to see if there was a “Powered By…”. Many years ago, that’s how I first became aware of Ghost and WordPress. But then again, I am a little strange. 
Odd that it is on by default for free sites, and off by default for paid sites.
If I were in charge it would be on by default for all sites, and if some site wanted to turn it off, then fine, they can go ahead and turn it off.
Otherwise it seems you are making a value judgement that Discourse is a bad thing, and people would pay money not to be reminded about it.
Or that it is just in it for the buck, so OK they got their buck, so now they can fade into the background.
The benefits of users noticing that Discourse is Powered by Discourse is they then have access to a vast amount of information about how to use it that the wouldn’t know about if it was just the stealth generic anonymous BBS.
And, to be extra democratic, how about giving individual users the ability to turn off “Powered by Discourse” too? And in fact turn it back on, to boot!
That makes me think that the “powered by” button should probably link to the upcoming Discourse Discover for a better showcase.
Could the link work according to the Open all external links in a new tab user preference?
I got an idea. That Powered by Discourse thing should be also shown at the bottom of the five balls page!
You know, the one users see while a site is loading.
What better thing to do with their eyeballs during that time!?
Or maybe it is already and I just don’t know.
I mean depending on internet and forum speed, it’s possible for you to never see that page, ever. (Theoretically, the chances of it are probably pretty low, because everyone is on a slow network now and then)
