Discourse 3.0 released with new features and fixes

Discourse 3.0 has been released and it comes with exciting new features, bug fixes, security updates, and performance improvement. It is codenamed Nipkow. 

Discourse 3.0

Discourse 3.0 was released on January 10, 2023, and is available for installation for both open source (self-hosted) and cloud hosting (hosted). Upgrade from 2.0 versions to 3.0 is not expected to break sites but you should take notice of Ruby and Rails update to avoid any errors when upgrading.

New Features in Discourse 3.0

Some of the key new features in discourse 3.0 include;

• Setup Wizard: If you are installing Discourse for the first time, quick steps are now provided with features you should enable or disable.
• Chat Channels: The site admin can now create channels in Discourse where members can chat in real-time.
• Profile Status: Now you can update your profile status to indicate whether you are busy or away on vacation. Admin needs to enable the feature for community members to use it.
• Notification Types: You can choose which notification to read as icons have been added in the notification menu to classify notifications by type (likes, replies, mentions, comments, badges earned, messages, etc.).
• Ruby and Rails upgrade: Discourse 3.0 now uses Ruby 3.1 and Rails 7.
• Dark Mode: Discourse 3.0 now supports dark mode in emails.
• Read-only: You can now make your discourse community read-only to prevent posting or any action. This is important if you are going on vacation or will not be available to moderate content. However, your discourse staff can now post and take actions.
• Inactive member messaging warning: You will now receive a warning message when you try to send a message to a user who has not accessed the community for a while. The exact number of days or years the user has been inactive will be indicated in the warning message.

Some of the security fixes in Discourse 3.0 include preventing moderators from importing a theme via API, preventing caching of errors response of static assets, upgrade of Rails to 7.0, etc.

Discourse contributors and developers have been working on version 3.0 since January 27, 2022. There are hundreds of changes that have been made since then. You can read the full release notes on Discourse Meta.