Discourse

SEO-friendly structure

Discourse is built to be SEO-friendly in both its design and its software.

Thanks to its speed and built-in structured data, you get a site that search engines can crawl easily without extra effort.

Simple. Modern. Fun. Discourse!

Discourse removes the clutter and shows only what is needed on screen, based on your participants' needs. It offers most of the modern features you would expect from large social platforms such as X (Twitter) or Facebook.

Mention someone with an @name tag. Paste a link or an image and let Discourse automatically make that content look great for you. Quote and link replies and topics with ease. Wherever you are, reply to topics online or by email. Remember, Discourse "really works!" on your phone and tablet too.

Let your community moderate itself

Discourse is, above all, an attempt to rethink from scratch what a modern internet discussion platform should be today, in a world shaped by smartphones, tablets and social media platforms such as Facebook and X (Twitter). Civil communities move confidently into the future.

The special trust system inside Discourse means your community develops a natural immune system to protect itself from trolls, bad actors and SPAM; your most engaged community members can help moderate your community. With a simple flagging system, we put a rubbish bin on every street corner.

Users who behave positively and are respectful and courteous are encouraged through badges. With Discourse's universal rules of civility, you gently educate your members by stepping in at just the right time.

Community management tools

• Weekly digest emails: Let all your users know, weekly or monthly, what happened while they were away from the site. Stay in constant touch with your users.
• Full user permission control
• Customisable design: Discourse comes with a white and black design by default, but you can fully customise the design to your liking.
• Advanced ad management: Run ad management fully compatible with AdSense across your community. Start earning from the content that is produced.
• Put an end to trolls and SPAM: Discourse comes with a built-in SPAM blocking system made exclusively for Discourse.
• Integrated statistics tracking

Hosting options and pricing

On your server: You can install Discourse on your own server yourself, or leave a turnkey installation to us (SMTP service is planned separately). Discourse officially runs on VPS, cloud or bare-metal servers using its Docker-based installation; running it on shared hosting or on the same server as control panels such as cPanel is not recommended.

Once the installation is complete, you can pay the hosting fee directly to your cloud provider and take care of managing and maintaining the software yourself. We will not leave you on your own afterwards; you can always reach us through our community support. We prepare a tailored price quote for installation and hosting based on your needs.

Your data always belongs to you. You can back up your Discourse data from your admin panel at any time and use that backup to move easily to another hosting provider. If you would like us to handle the migration, we will give you a tailored quote for migration and installation.

Education and non-profit communities: We can offer discount options for educational institutions and non-profit organisations. Contact us for the current terms.

Plan changes, limits and migration

• Switching between packages: You can downgrade or upgrade your package at any time for any reason. Let us know and we will do it for you right away.
• Discourse-to-Discourse migration: Moving your own Discourse to us, or from us to your own server, is quite simple and usually quick, depending on the size of your community.
• If you exceed plan limits: We know your site may suddenly attract a lot of visitors for all sorts of reasons, and that this is a success worth celebrating. So instead of stopping your site right away when limits are exceeded, we get in touch with you; if your site exceeds the plan limits for several months in a row, we review flexible upgrade options together.

Dedicated email server

• Deliverability-focused configuration: Our team configures your community's dedicated email server in line with standards such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, aiming to increase the rate at which your emails reach your users' inboxes. Because delivery also depends on the policies of receiving servers, no absolute guarantee can be given.
• Community digest option: With daily, weekly or monthly options, your users can easily keep up with what is happening in your community while they are away, thanks to summary emails in their inbox.
• Boost user engagement: With this service your users stay engaged with your community and keep up with what is happening, which supports fresh, quality content and helps reduce unanswered topics.

Dedicated backup

Backup service made for Discourse: Have all your Discourse community data automatically backed up daily to our high-security servers and enjoy sleeping soundly at night.

Fully automated backup service: Whatever the size of your Discourse community, this service lets you create daily automatic backups on our reliable servers instead of manual, local ones, and restore from them whenever you need.

The backup retention period depends on the plan you choose; if something goes wrong, you can easily restore one of the stored backups.

Discourse's amazing features

Discourse developers are always thinking about what a modern discussion platform should have.

• Conversations, not pages: Why split conversations into awkward, arbitrary pages where you constantly have to find the next page button? In Discourse all of that has been replaced by the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Just keep scrolling down.
• Dynamic notifications: We notify you when someone quotes your post. We also let you know when someone mentions you as @name. If you are not around, we send you a digest email as well.
• Simple and connected: Discourse is simple, flat community software where replies flow down the page in a single line. You can expand a linked conversation, or the posts below and above every linked post, without losing your place.
• Born for mobile: Discourse is designed for high-resolution touch devices with a built-in mobile layout. Read and write from the browser of your choice, on your laptop, tablet and phone.
• Automatically expanded links: Want to share a great link you found? Paste it into your post and let Discourse make it look great automatically. Hundreds of links from Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, X (Twitter), Flickr and other popular websites can be expanded automatically to provide extra context and information.

Content and communication features

• Multilingual interface support
• SEO, search engine optimisations
• Markdown, BBCode and HTML formatting
• Blog integration (WordPress)
• Automatic and profile-specific avatars
• Email invitations
• Mailing list support
• Anonymous posting
• File attachments
• Spoiler hiding
• Embeddable polls
• Desktop notifications
• Automatic draft saving
• Post revision history
• Personal private messaging system

Moderation and community features

• Automatic backups
• CDN support
• Drag-and-drop image uploads
• Collaborative wiki post editing
• Inline and bulk moderation
• Sorting of flagged posts
• Site-wide notices, pinned topics
• Invite-only membership for your site
• Easily add custom fields
• Site analytics dashboard
• Approved post publishing
• Self-managed user groups
• Featuring popular topics
• Incoming and outgoing link tracking