Resenha - Add Discord-style Video and Voice Rooms and Calls to Your Community 🎙

[Falco]

IMPORTANT: As of 1st of September 2026, this is now a bundled plugin in Discourse core, and renamed to “Voice”. You now just need to enable it from the admin page.

Hey everyone! Sharing Resenha, a new plugin that adds voice and video chat rooms directly into Discourse — no external apps required, just peer-to-peer WebRTC in your sidebar.

Try It Live

https://discourse-on-a-pi5.falco.dev/

How It Works

Click a room in the sidebar to join, click again to leave. By default all media goes peer-to-peer via WebRTC — your Discourse server only handles signaling, never media. Sites that need bigger calls can optionally route rooms through a LiveKit media server — either LiveKit Cloud or a self-hosted one. A default “Watercooler” room is created on install so your community can start talking immediately.

Features

• Sidebar-first UX — rooms and live participant avatars right in the sidebar, Discord-style, with animated speaking indicators
• Video and screen sharing — optional camera video and screen/tab sharing with a full room page, tile/presentation layouts, and fullscreen support
• Persistent call widget — a docked, resizable mini-call that follows you as you browse the forum, video included
• Voice and video settings — device pickers, live mic test, input sensitivity gate, WebAssembly noise suppression (DTLN), and MediaPipe background blur — all processed locally in the browser
• Room chat — each room gets a text chat backed by real Discourse chat channels and threads
• Stage rooms — speaker/audience rooms with a request-to-speak queue, for AMAs and community calls
• Room permissions — public, group-restricted, and private rooms, with lock badges in the sidebar and room hashtags for linking rooms in posts
• Participant controls — context menu with per-user volume, mute, deafen, and kick; plus AFK auto-mute/disconnect and automatic user status
• Room management — user room creation gated by groups, staff CRUD UI, and a full REST API for programmatic control
• Zero infrastructure by default — pure browser WebRTC with DTLS-SRTP encryption, no SFU/MCU needed
• Optional LiveKit integration — opt rooms in individually or route everything through LiveKit Cloud or your own LiveKit server for large calls, with an admin health panel and webhook-based reconciliation

Status

We have been using this for internal meetings for weeks now, and it works very well for small groups. Larger groups may want to deploy this along side LiveKit, but the usual sizes with up to 10 participants work very well on the default mesh configuration.

Installation

hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - git clone https://github.com/xfalcox/resenha.git

Enable in Admin > Settings > Plugins > resenha enabled.

Feedback Welcome

This is a new plugin — bugs, ideas, and questions are all welcome in this topic. PRs too!

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Note: This is not an official plugin.

[eisammy (Sammy)]

Review, awesome I love it thank you my fellow countryman

[dementad (Tad Davis)]

I just installed it and up and running in about half an hour. Seems to work well! Would love to see a few feature changes/additions:

Feature	Status
Rename a room	Not implemented
Delete a room	Not implemented
Change the default room name	Hard-coded
Tie rooms to Discourse categories	Not supported
Set per-room permissions	Not supported
Create auto-expiring rooms	Not supported
Room descriptions / topics	Not supported

[MachineScholar]

This is amazing. Is there any plan for the team to make it official once it’s out of alpha?

[Falco]

@MachineScholar

Is there any plan for the team to make it official once it’s out of alpha?

No plans currently, as this is mostly an exploration of the possibilities of the technology and how it can integrate with Discourse.

Still, like everything else, it depends on what our customers want.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

This is quite awesome Falco ! I can see quite a few applications for this being what you have listed. Feature plugins like this definitely helps make Discourse Meta the goto platform!

[jazznutUVA (Brian Zajick)]

Where is the option to create a new room?

[Falco]

There is no UI for that as this is an experimental project on the technology rather than a ready solution for productions sites.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

Shouldn’t,t the experimental be present for now?

Cool plugin

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

I’ve been having a play with this for a few days - and it is brilliant!!!

It solves the problem of easy ‘upgrading’ a forum/chat discussion into a verbal conversation beautifully. I’ve had years of struggling between the need to switch to other platforms, or having resource-heavy (attempts at) integrated video conferencing.

If you decide to take it further, I’d love it to be designed to integrate with chat. It would be simply sublime to be able to launch a private Voice room for the members of a chat directly from the chat (with a tidy up afterwards to keep things clean). And the chat would remain as the perfect place to drop in additional comments, files, links, etc.

Icing on the cake would of course be:

1. An option for video (likely not possible technically with such a lightweight tech)

2. AI transcription, clever enough to integrate related topics and chat. This would be absolutely amazing as a meeting scribe.

[Falco]

@nathank

I’ve been having a play with this for a few days - and it is brilliant!!!

It solves the problem of easy ‘upgrading’ a forum/chat discussion into a verbal conversation beautifully. I’ve had years of struggling between the need to switch to other platforms, or having resource-heavy (attempts at) integrated video conferencing.

Thanks for the feedback! That was exactly my goal with this!

@nathank

If you decide to take it further, I’d love it to be designed to integrate with chat. It would be simply sublime to be able to launch a private Voice room for the members of a chat directly from the chat (with a tidy up afterwards to keep things clean). And the chat would remain as the perfect place to drop in additional comments, files, links, etc.

Definitely, that would be a logical next step, with ephemeral rooms to back it up.

@nathank

An option for video (likely not possible technically with such a lightweight tech)

It’s very doable, both without a SFU/MCU for people with good enough upload, or with optional support for it.

[eisammy (Sammy)]

This were perfect I not will update for a long period but feb I’ll update for last time when ESR is launched for include this plugin

I am so excited for that and I hope to comes.

@nathank

Se você decidir levá-lo adiante, eu adoraria que fosse projetado para integrar-se ao chat.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

Want to use a more water-cooler like icon?

Pop this in a TC:

// Put this in the JS tab or in /javascripts/discourse/api-initializers/...
import { apiInitializer } from "discourse/lib/api";

export default apiInitializer(api => {
  api.replaceIcon("microphone-lines", "bottle-water");
});

/* Flip the bottle-water icon upside down in Resenha sidebar - put in Common*/
.sidebar-section.sidebar-section-wrapper [class*="d-icon-microphone-lines"] {
  transform: rotate(180deg);
  /* Optionally, tweak vertical alignment if needed */
  display: inline-block;
}

[Falco]

@dementad

I just installed it and up and running in about half an hour. Seems to work well! Would love to see a few feature changes/additions:

@jazznutUVA

Where is the option to create a new room?

There is now UI for managing rooms.

[gilles]

Thanks Falco for this plugin

This is great work

[eisammy (Sammy)]

I’m testing in production I’ll be back with feedbacks! Let’s Review

[eisammy (Sammy)]

Maybe a ring could be better in this case? when I among a room and click on my own profile or another profile DOM refresh returning to homepage.

[Falco]

@dementad

Set per-room permissions

@dementad

Room descriptions / topics

There is now a room details screen using the kebab menu pattern from Discourse Chat

[Falco]

@eisammy

Maybe a ring could be better in this case?

It doesn’t overlap on the default theme, maybe adjust yours theme to handle the less pace for padding?

@eisammy

when I among a room and click on my own profile or another profile DOM refresh returning to homepage.

This is now fixed.

[Falco]

In light of recent news, I added a new feature to the plugin: an AI-powered noise filter.

Admins can make it available via a site setting (default: off), and then users can opt into it by clicking on their own user in a voice chat room.