Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It works as: a mailing list, a discussion forum, a long-form chat room.
About Discourse
Discourse is a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, an 100% open-source discussion platform that is free for everyone to use and contribute to -- forever. Key mission goals:
A flattened, endlessly scrolling discussion, avoiding the awkardness of traditionally threaded and paginated discussion, while allowing replies to be expanded in place for additional context.
A user trust system that grants users additional rights to assist in moderating the forum as they participate in good faith over time. The goal is for the forum to be nearly self-moderating in the absence of any formal moderators, although excellent moderators accelerate the process greatly.
An advanced JavaScript app which runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet, without the need for a native app.
A contemporary, robust technology stack, free of legacy PHP and MySQL constraints limiting developers and administrators.
The Discourse team wishes to foster an active community of contributors, all of whom commit to delivering this continued vision, ensuring that free, unfettered online discussion can grow and thrive in an Internet age dominated by micro-blogging, and diminishing attention spans. Online discussion belongs to all of us, not just huge corporate websites.
This vision translates to the following functional commitments:
- Support only modern browsers on the desktop:
- Internet Explorer 9.0 (may not be fully functional), 10.0+
- Firefox 16+
- Google Chrome 23+
- Safari 5+
- Support the latest generation of tablets, 7" or larger
- iPad 2+
- Android 4.1+
- Windows 8
- Deliver support for the latest generation of small screen mobile/smartphones as soon as possible:
- Windows Phone 8
- iOS 5+
- Android 4.0+
Expertise
Discourse is built from the following open source components:
- Ruby on Rails - Our back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully and responds in JSON.
- Ember.js - Our front end is an Ember.js app that communicates with the Rails API.
- PostgreSQL - Our main data store is in Postgres.
- Redis - We use Redis for our job queue, rate limiting, as a cache and for transient data.
