Discourse

Overview

Discourse is a discussion platform. People start topics in categories, and others reply. It works as a public community forum, a customer support community, a members’ area, or an internal space for announcements and long-form discussion that would get lost in chat.

Main capabilities:

• Categories and tags to organize topics, with per-category permissions.
• A rich editor with Markdown, image uploads, quotes, polls, and @mentions.
• Email integration: get notifications and digests by email, and reply by email.
• Trust levels that automatically give experienced members more abilities, reducing moderation work.
• Moderation tools: flags, review queue, slow mode, topic timers, and user suspensions.
• Chat channels alongside topics.
• Search, bookmarks, badges, and a mobile-friendly design.
• Plugins and themes to extend features and change the look.

What it replaces

Discourse replaces Facebook Groups and Circle for communities, Google Groups and mailing lists for discussion, and paid forum platforms such as Vanilla Forums and Khoros.

Signing in

Members sign up or sign in from the Log In button. Depending on how your forum is configured, your colleagues may use the organization account through single sign-on, while public community members create their own Discourse accounts.

For members

Start and reply to topics

• Choose + New Topic, pick a category, write a clear title, and post.
• Reply to the whole topic with the Reply button at the bottom, or to a specific post with that post’s reply button.
• Select text in a post and choose Quote to quote it in your reply.

Stay up to date

• On any topic or category, use the bell to choose Watching, Tracking, Normal, or Muted.
• Open your avatar, Preferences, Emails to choose how often you get email digests and whether you get emails for mentions and replies.
• Use Bookmark to save a post and set a reminder.

For moderators and administrators

Run the setup wizard

The first time an administrator signs in, Discourse offers a setup wizard for the forum name, logo, colors, and basic access settings. You can run it again from Admin, Setup wizard.

Plan your categories

Start with a few broad categories, then add more as needed. In each category’s settings (the wrench), set:

• Security: which groups can see, reply to, or create topics. Use this for private areas such as “Staff” or “Members only”.
• Settings: default sort order, topic templates, and whether new topics need approval.

Moderate

• Review flagged posts and queued content in the Review queue.
• From a user’s profile, Admin lets you silence, suspend, or delete accounts, and change their trust level.
• Use Topic timers to close or archive topics automatically, and slow mode to cool down heated threads.

Key admin settings

Open Admin (the wrench in the hamburger menu):

• Settings: search for any setting by name, for example login required to make the forum private, or must approve users to vet new members.
• Customize: install themes and theme components, edit text strings, and set up email templates.
• Users and Groups: manage members and create groups for permissions and mentions.
• Emails: check outgoing mail and logs if members say they aren’t receiving notifications.

Superpanel settings

• Access: whether staff sign in with the organization account (single sign-on).
• Administrators: who gets admin rights in Discourse.

Plugins on Discourse require a rebuild of the application. On Federated Core, ask Federated Computer support to add a plugin; themes and theme components can be installed from the admin screens without help.