Discourse

Discourse is free and open source forum software written in Ruby on Rails,

Discourse 3.0 is now available

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We're excited to announce the release of Discourse 3.0 with chat, a customizable sidebar, and an easier setup wizard for new communities 🎉

Comes with real-time chat, a customisable sidebar, user status and more..

Also, it is 9 years since Discourse 1.0

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The sidebar is definitely an improvement. Many people like the free in-built chat as well.

Discourse is a very nice software. It is very popular and there are many fans who love it.

Yes, I thought the same. The sidebar is something that was missing from Discourse's core UI. It really helps a lot when someone new lands on the page.

The latest posts view is not adored by all.

I checked one of the forums that I visit for tips and it is indeed helpful to have that sidebar there.

It is more like AdminWeb now. Discussions only can be confusing at times.

Free calendar plugin from Discourse

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Discourse Calendar gives the ability to create a dynamic calendar in the first post of a topic. New calendar items can be added by posting a reply with a date using the “Insert Date” modal.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-calendar/97376

Discourse now has AI modules. It can flag toxic posts, detect NSFW images, help you find a good title for your post using Composer AI helper, sense the sentiment of the post and rate it with an emoji as postiive/negative, semantic related topics, semantic search etc using Discourse AI.

You can soon expect these features too

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Extraction of text from images
PII detection
Generate topic thumbnails using AI
Automatic image captions
Emoji contextual suggestions

Most of them have their own GitHub repo. I assume if you are going to use it on a self hosted instance, it won't be hard.

Discourse is way ahead of other open source forum software. They look quite professional, good SEO and a lot of features.