Discourse is a free, open-source forum software written in Ruby on Rails and Ember.js, co-founded by Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow). Designed for civilized community discussion, Discourse powers thousands of communities including Twitter Developers, BoingBoing, the Rust language forum, and the official forums of countless OSS projects.
It is one of the largest Rails open-source applications and a showcase of modern Rails architecture.
Modern open-source forum software. Built for civilized community discussions on the web.
✨ Features
Trust levels, badges, likes, mentions. Encourages civilized discussion through community norms.
Users can reply to topics directly via email. Discourse handles full email parsing and threading.
Flags, hidden posts, user silencing, suspension, trust-level gating, IP-screen rules.
First-class plugin API. Voting, polls, AI assistant, chat, gamification — all available.
WebSocket-based live updates. New replies, edits, presence indicators appear instantly.
