There is no obvious notification system there. I don’t even see an RSS button.
The chips there are sure not as helpful for understanding the big picture as the previous pattern of posting what you consider to be the highlights of a release.
The new-format content-free release announcements are no longer posts worth linking to to highlight exciting new features in Discourse. They will function as notifications to those of use who use watching emails as our primary trigger to update, but no longer present a realistic option for us to post socially about “look at the cool new stuff in Discord this month”. The releases site does not give that view. It’s just a little sugar sprinkled on git log.
I understand it’s an optimization for how you spend your time. But it’s not obvious to me how the releases site was seen as a functional replacement for the utility of the announcements. And I’m not going to try to guess what’s interesting from reading through a bunch of commit messages formatted on chips that are basically git log except taking five times as much vertical space, making them harder to read. So I will probably be sadly unaware of what’s actually interesting in upcoming Discourse releases.
I’d love to see RSS. There is an RSS feed for each category, for the Announcements category it’s this. And for the release-notes tag, it’s this. (See Finding Discourse RSS feeds which is hopefully up to date.)
The “Highlights” section at the top of each changelog is manually curated by our product team, exactly like the old release notes which were posted on Meta. For most people, that’s the only bit you need to read.
The full git changelog is also available for people who need more detail. But we’re certainly not expecting people to dig through that as a regular thing.
From this topic and the link provided, I thought (without having reason to check) that 2026.3.0 was released (in the context of the 33 security fixes mentioned). Now I see my error.
Looking at 2026.2, I see the highlights. In small type, light text on colored background. It’s a light-mode site with the dark-mode characteristic of light text on dark background that is the main reason that many of us who have not gone to the dark-mode side don’t like dark mode. I don’t see an explicit light/dark mode toggle so I assume it’s following my browser preference for light mode or has no mode at all, but it’s really hard to read.
I’m sure the automation here saves you time, but my third party feedback is that this is not an improvement in experience. And I would have done that in a separate topic if I’d understood; sorry!
Thanks! We’re very open to making changes here to improve the experience, so specific actionable feedback like this is very useful. While the automation aspect is nice for us, that doesn’t mean we’re willing to sacrifice the usability of the changelogs.
The releases site is also fully open-source, so PRs are welcome! (of course, best to agree any changes on Meta first before spending time on it)
The RSS feed is great; having both “started” and “released” is helpful information! It might be interesting to include the content of the highlights in the release notifications, but just having a clear signal of events is huge and from my point of view a huge benefit and absolutely meets the need.
@derek Looking forward to seeing styling improvements. It would be awesome if backgrounds would be limited in saturation to colors that allow text to be dark in light mode, and light in dark mode, with contrast ratios that meet accessibility guidelines. If the text could be the same size as it is in Discourse per se that would be a user benefit, I’d suggest, and might be helpful for brand coherence.
