Discourse is a free open source, simple, modern, extraordinarily powerful and feature-rich community discussion software. It works as a mailing list, discussion forum as well as long-form chat room. Its front-end is designed using JavaScript and it’s powered by the Ember.js framework and the back end is developed with Ruby on Rails backed by a PostgreSQL database and Redis cache.
Discourse was designed with high-resolution touch devices in mind and switches automatically to a mobile layout for small screens. It supports dynamic notifications, community moderation, social login, reply via email, spam blocking, emojis, and badges etc. It comes with a trust system and much more.
Features include:
- Simple and flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line.
- Dynamic Notifications and Infinite scrolling.
- Single sign-on.
- Spam blocking.
- 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 other members to maintain and moderate the community.
- Social login.
- Two-factor authentication.
- Official plugins that extend functionality.
- One-click upgrades.
- SEO optimized for Google indexing and searching.
- Tags – when users create topics they can optionally attach tags.
- Markdown, BBCode, and HTML formatting in posts
- Automatic backups.
- CDN and themes support.
- Blog integration.
- Automatic & custom avatars.
- Email invitations and Mailing list support.
- Full page search.
- Comprehensive API.
- Summarize topics.
- Drag and drop attachments.
- Admin Dashboard shows the most relevant and essential community health metrics right at the top, as well as trending searches.
- Internationalization support i.e translations are available for 25 languages.
So overall, Discourse is simple, modern, awesome and fun, and has a one-click upgrade feature, once installed. Also, its the best forum for you if you want the same features as given above on your forum web site.
