In a discussion titled ‘Where can I find basic (user) documentation for Discourse?’, keunes expresses frustration at the lack of accessible, browsable user documentation for Discourse, despite its intuitive interface. They note that searching the forum (with over 13k threads) is difficult without precise terms, and external searches lead to unhelpful resources like the blog, API docs, or commercial feature lists. trs80 agrees, describing the forum as the de facto documentation and bug tracker, but too unstructured and unclear in search results to be reliable. IAmGav suggests visiting https://meta.discourse.org/docs for more structured information or simply asking the community. JammyDodger recommends the New User Guide at https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-new-user-guide/96331 as a helpful starting point for general user information. The consensus is that while no centralized, official user manual exists, community resources and guides can fill the gap.
A project I’m involved in uses Discourse for its forum. Generally it’s very intuitive and I like it a lot. I am wondering though how a few things work. But I can’t seem to find any basic documentation on Discourse.
When starting a new thread here, the following is suggested: Before asking, did you search first? Press 🔍 at the upper right to search.
But on a forum with over 13k threads (impressive number, btw) it isn’t quite easy to find the right information (as I might be using the wrong search terms). I would rather just browse a (modest) catalogue with information.
Searching for how a feature works (through my favourite search engine), I ended up on
the blog
the API documentation
the feature list on the website for Discourse’s commercial branch
Neither of which was of any help.
Am I correct to conclude there is no documentation? Could it be considered to add such documentation?
Yeah, I had the same feeling when searching for something recently, that this forum was the only real documentation and bug tracker but it’s too unstructured to be useful and it’s not clear from a Google results page that it’s authoritative.