lindsey kicked off the Current Projects – October 2025 newsletter to unveil upcoming admin area changes and image grid support, prompting one1 to ask about AI opt-out options [403328/2] and Falco to clarify AI Search toggling behavior [403328/4]. read more
Moin released Filter Favorites in Filter Favorites, enabling users to save and default their favorite topic filters. Community feedback praised the hack, and sam suggested first-party support for future enhancements [386594/4]. read more
A new wave of spam emerged in Spam from “system”, where “system” suddenly posted Chinese shipping and tax compliance ads. Falco traced the bug to incoming emails landing under the system user [386364/4], and the team is working on a fix. read more
Dax reported that Pie charts ignore ranked-choice weighting in “Ranked choice” polls don’t work properly with pie charts. The consensus was that preventing Pie selection for ranked polls is needed, as Sankey diagrams remain the only suitable visualization [386168/3]. read more
ice.d discussed Official groups/posts, proposing a middle ground between pinned and bannered topics. tobiaseigen and Moin dissected pin/unpin settings, adjusting defaults to surface key posts [386255/6]. read more
sok777 asked if flagging could reduce gamification points in Reducing points for flagged users. Falco outlined how to apply penalties via the Gamification API but noted built-in scoring remains positive only [386482/2]. read more
tobiaseigen shared highlights from Toronto Community Week, where Saif, Jenny, and ruben talked migrations, community building, and even Discourse socks. read more
lindsey unveiled an updated lightbox built on PhotoSwipe, improving image viewing on desktop & mobile and adding gallery navigation controls. read more
hugh announced 3.6.0.beta2, with editable built-in theme colour palettes, live AI translation progress bars, and enhanced wiki tracking. read more
hameedacpa asked for an AI-powered “Format” button to convert text into SEO-friendly headers & bullets—NateDhaliwal shared an effective prompt and results. read more
jrgong suggested a slash-command menu (/) in the Rich Text Editor, similar to Notion, for adding images, GIFs, polls, etc. read more
craigconstantine discussed the Horizon theme + Topic Thumbnails component, detailing podcaster and gardening use cases and requesting official support. read more
A security report from a third-party researcher prompted Falco to advise routing issues through HackerOne. read more
NathanJPearce asked about chapter-specific Discourse threads on FF7.com; ToddZ and chapoi guided him through permalinks and the WordPress Discourse plugin. read more
Ahmed7 reported missing reactions on iOS; sam walked through safe-mode testing and NateDhaliwal traced it to a CSS conflict in the Jira plugin. read more
itsbhanusharma diagnosed Discourse backups hidden by theme CSS and helped restore S3 backup visibility in a Marketplace request. read more
tyler-mairose-sp canvassed AI content policies; j127, Tris20, and others weighed in on disclosure, vetting, and category isolation strategies. read more
Mail integration FAQs were clarified: Lilly and tobiaseigen explained Mailgun API visibility differences between hosted vs. self-hosted (#386821) and showed how to enable reply_by_email via site settings (#387229). read more Mailgun • read more Email-in
arun wanted G > C to jump to specific categories; pfaffman demonstrated a Theme Component that adds KeyboardShortcuts.addShortcut("g 1", …). read more
bayardo.rivas revisited Top Referred Topics spikes on a private forum; tobiaseigen concluded they’re likely bot or social-share traffic with no further action needed. read more
nathank pointed out that the tracking button hover text (“Tracking”) is misleading; awesomerobot and the team debated clearer wording like “notification level.” read more
tkforbes highlighted low-contrast ticks on Going / Interested / Not Going event buttons; led to a discussion on color accessibility and icon weight. read more
Richie reported the quote popup hidden behind iPadOS menus; sam noted an iPhone fix and suggested extending it to iPad. read more
tobiaseigen kicked off the Toronto Community Week recap, fielded questions on migrations and swag, and globally pinned the topic for weekend visibility. view kickoff • view pin
Falco authored the Discourse MCP announcement and demo, then guided a thread on extending MCP integrations beyond Jira. launch post • Jira demo
lindsey delivered the PhotoSwipe lightbox rollout and iterated on user feedback around gallery navigation and loop settings. read intro • user feedback
sam troubleshot iOS reaction issues, walked through safe-mode tests, and proposed an LLM-powered sitemap compression approach. reactions debug • sitemap RAG
supermathie spearheaded an overhaul of the emails:test rake task, added true STARTTLS toggles, and polished failure messages. task refactor
awesomerobot clarified the notification hover text, suggested UX improvements, and added a giphy_size_variant setting for controlling GIF file sizes. hover fix • giphy setting
pfaffman assisted with multisite Postgres restore errors, shared mail-in polling tips, and demonstrated the power of KeyboardShortcuts.addShortcut in a custom Theme Component. Postgres fix • shortcut demo
Jenny, Saif, and ruben amplified the community presence at Toronto Community Week, co-authoring the recap and showcasing Discourse’s migration expertise.
Juan_David_Martínez merged a fix for the Brand Header + Versatile Banner conflict, ensuring these theme components play nicely together.
loic backported a performance improvement that makes disabled plugins truly inert, reducing unnecessary serializer calls.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
Introducing chat search lindsey unveiled the new chat search feature on Nov 5, enabling full-channel, group chat and DM search via the sidebar read more.
Discourse Doc Categories on Business plans nat announced that the Discourse Doc Categories plugin is now available on our Business hosting tier.
Do we want to auto-close support topics? tobiaseigen proposed auto-closing Support topics 30 days after last reply in [387520/1], sparking a community debate with Moin and Falcoread more.
Pinning topics globally on Meta tobiaseigen is experimenting with pinning up to three global topics and disabling auto-unpin, making it easier to revisit pinned discussions read more.
Search toggle re-opens on every click Moin reported that after using the back button, every click would toggle search open/closed; cvx fixed it in PR 35876 read more.
Undefined ICS file name in calendar plugin dax discovered .ics downloads were named undefined.ics; sam merged PR 35886 to unify ICS generation and fix filenames read more.
Photos half-displayed in Chrome PWA on tablets Moin repro’d an RTL lightbox bug on Android and iPad, tracked in [387639/6].
Staff action logs show the wrong user
Navigating between users’ action logs didn’t update the filter; gabriel’s PR 35842 restored correct filtering read more.
Bookmarks search permission error
Searching for :test in bookmarks threw a 500 error due to a missing SQL param, fixed by PR 35850 read more.
Single-post translation button missing MiikkaLaitila asked how to enable the “Translate now” button in content-localization; nat and Moin guided adding addTranslation to the post menu in [387756/1].
Migrating Mattermost channels italo outlined how to build a custom import script for migrating Mattermost to Discourse in [386881/5], covering DM import, mentions and attachments.
Installing a new theme deletes color palettes kris.kotlarek shipped PR 35754 to preserve custom palettes when new themes are added read more.
Reworking emails:test output Moin reported an unexpected admin alert in rake emails:test; pmusaraj suppressed it for hosted sites in [387286/5].
Color-input component for non-admins pirhoo asked if color-input could live outside discourse/admin; david recommended copying the component into your plugin for now read more.
The Community Lifecycle: From Launch to Legacy HAWK explored community stages from Inception to Mitosis and the need for archival support in [387820/1].
How Discourse Uses Discourse blake detailed how our 100+ employee remote org runs entirely on Discourse in [387597/1].
Styleguide_allowed_groups setting ignored gormus discovered that the Styleguide plugin was open to all; pmusaraj fixed it in PR 35912 after Moin’s repro in [387869/1].
“New posts” banner too small on iPad AstonJ noted the updated thread notice got too narrow and hid avatars; PR 35852 restored multi-avatar breakpoints read more.
Reviewable-type styling breaks in German Moin spotted that German reviewable classes weren’t colored; tracked in [387729/1].
Huge gap under tables on tablets Moin shared screenshots of extra vertical space below table-builder layouts in [333153/1].
“Off Topic” hide functionality thec proposed folding off-topic replies behind a red banner toggle, a classic feature from older forums in [387619/1].
Lightning “tip this post” plugin chavic floated a Breez SDK-powered Bitcoin tipping plugin; early discussion in [387770/1].
Slash-command composer extension ego-lay_atman-bay adapted a BBCode snapblocks extension for Rich Text Editor, later fixed by switching from html_raw to bbcode_open tokens in [387753/2].
Admin setting for default calendar view manuel asked for a setting to choose Month/Week/Year defaults, with route suggestions in [387389/5].
Exclude GIFs from topic thumbnails jrgong requested skipping GIFs in topic cards for cleaner thumbnails in [387446/1].
Site Management (#site-management)
Admin guide to tags Moin pointed out /tag_groups after the missing menu entry was fixed in [121041/41].
Email revocation message UX Ltrlg examined confusing bounce notices and suggested clearer wording in [387675/1].
Huge “Top referred topics” spikes bayardo.rivas saw unreal click counts in private forums; tobiaseigen advised Marketplace support in [330332/6].
Digest/Activity Summary issues Jacob_Peebles and @tobiaseigen tracked missing digest emails and related plugin fixes across [385651] and [385621].
Moin spotted and clarified why there was no edit option for a flagged post, guiding on post-menu settings and permissions for restoring flagged content.
Theme & UX
ばこん updated the Glacier Theme to fix excessive width and address mobile Safari border glitches under Theme.
putty released Hidden User Fields, a theme component enabling user-field visibility restricted to specified groups, sparking discussions on object editor settings.
Lilly assisted adopilot in troubleshooting the User Card Directory component, resolving console errors and verifying compatibility with the latest Discourse release.
Live AMA with Sam & Hawk sam and HAWK fielded questions on the next 5–20 years of Discourse, Docker launcher improvements, AI moderation experiments, and Discourse ID guarantees in the What’s Next for Discourse AMA. read more
Resenha Voice Rooms Falco launched Resenha, a WebRTC‐powered, peer-to-peer, end-to-end-encrypted voice chat plugin that lives in your sidebar. read more
Slow First-Load Performance itsbhanusharma and RGJ diagnosed sluggish first-load times on some VPS hosts as I/O constraints, recommending CDN fronting or provider changes. read more
Tags Dropdown Scroll weels spotted missing tags in the new-topic dialog on #tagging (Site feedback); the light scrollbar hides extra tags beyond six. read more
Bootstrap Let’s Encrypt ENOENT featheredtoast identified missing runit files on Ubuntu LTS setups, documenting a /etc/docker/daemon.json overlay2 fix. read more
Development
Plugin Storage Patterns Ethsim2’s question on storing a single Topic ID led sam to propose deprecating PluginStore in favor of dedicated tables (discussion). read more
Discourse Vibe (dv) sam unveiled dv, a multi-container dev tool for running AI agents, doing PR checkouts, and managing test containers. read more
Inline Script Modernization
A deep-dive in dev-news showed how to replace legacy <script> tags with api.renderAfterWrapperOutlet and Glimmer components (#366482/43). read more
Automating Plugin Updates merefield demonstrated adding after_code hooks in app.yml for auto-removal and cloning of custom plugin directories during rebuilds. read more
Sidekiq Runit Crash Fix hel_Sinki highlighted silent Sidekiq exits in the official Docker runit script; sam clarified current setups spawn Sidekiq under Unicorn. read more
UX
iOS Composer Fixes j.jaffeux delivered improvements for ios 26 and PWA composer positioning, addressing full-screen blurs and keyboard misalignment. read more
Unformatted Code Detector Error Moin reported a theme error on composer service init; core PR d2f5f964 resolves it. read more
Bulk Unassign in Assigns Tab Lilly proposed adding bulk actions (Feature) to the Assigns UI, mirroring bookmarks’ multi-select for easier moderation. read more
Unexpected Latest Listing Jagster noticed pinned topics showing in Horizon’s /latest without pin icons; behavior varies by new-user redirect and timeframe. read more
Tags Local-Scope Filter scavin requested scoping content-localization so users can only translate their own posts, improving translation safety and governance. read more
sam co-hosted the live AMA (#387794/26), unveiled the dv AI setup helper (#388622/1), announced Nano Banana 3 support (#380862/3), and weighed in on plugin storage deprecation (#388967/13).
Falco shipped the Resenha voice chat plugin (#389056/1), demoed Discourse Video Stream (#388754/1), and guided VK OAuth integration (#388073/7).
HAWK answered community roadmap and AI moderation questions during the Live AMA (#387794/25).
nat fixed the locale switcher for translated posts (#388624/2), tuned the AI spam detector UI (#388947/4), and led resolved translation bugs (#388848/8).
j.jaffeux rolled out iOS composer patches (#388476/10), delivered the inline script modernization guide (#366482/43), and applied chat quote overlay fixes (#387398/8).
lindsey published the November Current Projects update (#389228/1), clarified title-edit bumping policy (#383576/22), and merged solved snippet localization fixes (#388798/10).
tobiaseigen investigated TOP-page inconsistencies (#389423/2), demoed SSO setup via video (#223494/12), and shared theme-component authoring advice.
Lilly contributed to theme component improvements with restricted reactions (#388702/1) and quick-quote recovery (#143621/65).
