Why is Discourse still in Beta?

[Openmind (Torsten Därr)]

Hi everyone, the developer team that is building my site asks me why Discourse is still in beta. Since I’m not a developer myself I don’t know the answer to this question. Can you please give me the answer? Many thanks, Torsten

[nolo (Manuel)]

Beta is just one of several branches. Here’s a post explaining how Discourse handles releases:

Updates always come before release notes

This post was last updated 2021-06-28T04:00:00Z (UTC) to detail the current processes. Hi everyone! Multiple topics to address here, let me see if I can cover them all. This is an intentional decision on our end. We don’t have a formal release system for our beta releases. We put out a new release when it makes sense for us to do so. As such, there is generally little warning before a release, and thus not a lot of time to write up release notes. @codinghorror decided it did not make sense …

[Moin]

There is also a topic in #howto:faq

Is Discourse always in "beta"?

I noticed that every now and then my Discourse site send me an email telling that a new version is available to install, but every time the version is “x.y.z.beta something”, so I’d like to know: is Discourse always some “beta” version? Is it good to install in a production environment (i.e. to serve hundreds, maybe thowsands people)? Or does this concerns only free and not “cloud” versions?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

If they can’t find out then I have to wonder what else they can’t do or be able to find out. If they can’t answer that question, how are they going to figure out how to customize it?