Discourse is an open source discussion platform. Besides being used as a discussion forum, it’s also a capable mailing list, and long-form chat room.
Discourse was built with high resolution touch devices in mind, and switches automatically to a mobile layout for small screens.
Discourse is built with Ruby on Rails, Ember.ks, PostgreSQL, and Redis.
Key Features
- Simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line.
- Dynamic notifications.
- Infinite scrolling.
- Single sign-on.
- Trust system with 4 levels – Basic, Member, Regular, and Leader. They help to:
- Sandbox new users in your community so they don’t do stupid things.
- Grant experienced users more rights over time, so they can help everyone maintain and moderate the community.
- Spam blocking.
- Social login.
- Summarize topics.
- Badges.
- Emoji.
- Two-factor authentication – take advantage of the free Android or iOS authenticator apps on your smartphone for enhanced account security.
- Official plugins that extend functionality.
- Comprehensive API
- One-click upgrades.
- SEO optimized for Google indexing and searching.
- Tags – when users create topics they can optionally attach tags. They are a lightweight complement to categories, and to make them even more useful they can be mandatory on topics, per category.
- Markdown, BBCode, and HTML formatting in posts
- Automatic backups.
- CDN support.
- Blog integration.
- Automatic & custom avatars.
- Email invitations.
- Mailing list support.
- Themes support.
- Full page search.
- Drag and drop attachments.
- Admin Dashboard – shows the most relevant and essential community health metrics right at the top, as well as trending searches.
- Expanding links. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, Flickr and hundreds of other popular websites automatically expand to provide additional context and information.
- Supports OpenGraph and oEmbed.
- Internationalization support – translations are available for 25 languages including Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
Website: www.discourse.org
Support: GitHub code repository, Blog
Developer: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Discourse is written in JavaScript and Ruby. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Ruby with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Internet Forum Software | |
|---|---|
| Discourse | Discussion forum, mailing list, and long-form chat room |
| NodeBB | Community platform for the modern web |
| Flarum | Simple discussion platform for your website |
| Forem | Platform for building modern, independent, and safe communities |
| phpBB | Flat-forum bulletin board software solution |
| bbPress | Forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress |
| MyBB | Intuitive, extensible forum software |
| miniBB | Easy, lite, and speedy quick forum |
| Vanilla | Simple and flexible forum software |
| Thredded | Simple and feature rich Rails forum engine |
| Simple Machines Forum | Elegant, effective, powerful forum software |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Mailing List Managers | |
|---|---|
| listmonk | Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager |
| Sympa | Scalable and highly customizable modern mailing list manager |
| Mailman | Manage electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Python-based |
| Discourse | Capable mailing list, and long-form chat room |
| Mlmmj | Simple and slim mailing list manager (MLM) inspired by ezmlm |
| Keila | Send out newsletter campaigns and create sign-up forms |
| schleuder | Group’s email-gateway |
| ezmlm-idx | Highly automated mailing list manager |
| Dada Mail | Mature and intuitive web-based e-mail list management system |
| Majordomo | Perl based mailing list manager |
| ulist | Mailing list service that keeps it simple |
| Gray Duck Mail | Modern group email discussion lists |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |