Written by: Sebastiaan Janssen
Published: February 27, 2025

tl;dr; (too long; didn’t read;)

the forum on Our Umbraco is showing its age, and has done for a while; spam management is getting harder and harder
Discord is handling some of our forum needs right now, but it is too closed and a lot doesn't end up being searchable easily enough
we will keep using Discord for social chats and events
we're moving the community forum to a new purpose-built piece of software called Discourse
the new forum starts from scratch, but with the ability for you to continue threads from the old forum
watch the unboxing video
go to the Umbraco community forum: https://forum.umbraco.com

A little history about Our Umbraco

The team at HQ at the time when the Our Umbraco forum was built (2009!) thought it would be a great showcase of the things Umbraco could do apart from being "just" a content management system.

The fact that Umbraco is built on the ASP.NET stack meant that you could easily weave in custom functionality in the frontend of your website, combine that with a powerful member management system in Umbraco and you have a great example of the versatility of Umbraco.

A screenshot of the 2009 version of Our Umbraco

Unfortunately this came at a cost, once the forum started growing, it started attracting spammers. And spammers make accounts, a LOT of accounts. Not only that, they start clicking on a lot of buttons. The underlying code wasn't prepared for abuse, we like to be Friendly, right!

So we ended up with more and more performance problems and downtime. One of the first things I did, even before joining Umbraco HQ, was to take over ownership of that codebase and put in more aggressive caching and spam protections. This has worked really, really well. 16 years later, the forum is still doing its thing with little to no downtime.

Don't get me wrong, we still have loads of spammers signing up! It is the job of a few people at HQ and some community members to look at the first post of each new account on the forum. In the age of AI, this job has gotten a lot harder. Spammers try to cheat by generating a very plausible sounding technical answer and posting that, no spam in sight. Then, as soon as their account has been approved, they edit that post and start posting on other topics with spam links. Fun times 🙄

A screenshot of the 2016 iteration of Our Umbraco looking very close to what it still looks like today

Our Umbraco is not just the forum, over the years we bolted on more and more features. In recent years, we've been slowly detaching a lot of these as well; Things like the documentation, the community website and the packages marketplace now all have their own dedicated space.

Although large parts of the site have already moved, there's other things also still running. The releases page is the most prominently visible one but there are also a lot of things running in the background. These extra features have kept us stuck on Umbraco version 7. Upgrading and thoroughly testing everything is not something we have the bandwidth for, so we're slowly migrating things out of this website.

And now it's time for the forum. It's showing its age and we have been holding off on implementing new features in a very legacy codebase as it would be too much work to maintain.

We needed something new, purpose-built; Enter: Discourse.

Why Discourse?

Discourse has been on our radar for a few years now, but our team has been too small until now to make a proper move into adopting new forum software. This year, we finally have the bandwidth.

We investigated and tested all kinds of different platforms but Discourse has been an absolute no-brainer from the start, some of the winning traits are:

Open source and very permissively licensed; just the way we like it at Umbraco
Envisioned and partially built by one of the previous founders of Stack Overflow; Jeff Atwood and his team care, deeply, about making the best forum and community experience possible
Contains all of the features from our own custom built forum, and then some(!); while being actively maintained to keep improving all the time
Has a best in breed moderation system
Has a vibrant plugin eco-system; just the way we like it at Umbraco
We're in great company with thousands of communities that we respect running on Discourse as well
We own the data, and so do you; it's extremely important to us that we're not locked in to a provider that might go bankrupt or sell its business at some point

A fully featured API and access to well-structured backups makes sure that we could always easily move elsewhere is something happens to the Discourse project that we don't like; not that we're worried, but better safe than sorry
Each user on Discourse can easily export all of the data that they've put into the forum for use in any way they want

Having a dedicated piece of software that aligns completely with our values and philosophy really is an easy choice. After we dug in and ran it through its paces we were convinced this was the solution for us.

In the past few weeks, we have discussed our plans to move to Discourse with the Community advisory board and they helped us shape what the forum looks like right now. It will evolve over time, with their help and yours. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the forum feedback category.

What about Discord?

First off: yes, we are aware that the names of the products are terribly close - Discourse vs. Discord.. 😅

Discord was introduced when the original Umbraco community Slack space was getting more and more limitations. Slack is not really meant for communities and has removed more and more data from free spaces. Most importantly, Slack has been deleting conversations, meaning that previously answered questions just keep disappearing with no way to find them again. Additionally, the Slack space was completely private and that is completely against our philosophy of "sharing is caring".

At the same time, Discord started offering threaded channels which could be used to bridge the gap between our rapidly aging forum and the rapidly limited Slack space. Discord has served us well and we're going to keep it around for real-time collaboration and community-building happening there.

However, Discord has the same drawback as Slack, which is that it is private and therefore not accessible to search engines. We have been able to open that up with a tool that presents relevant conversations to the public internet. This is not a sustainable solution though:

we're relying on a 3rd party product to provide this data to the public
when you do find a conversation that you want to join, it is very difficult to do so

There's another problem lurking: when we started with Discord their intention seemed to be to move away from being a place where gamers get together to a place where communities get together. However, last year they changed their strategy again to go back to focusing mostly only on gaming communities. This worries us.

Ultimately, what we really want is for Umbracians to be able to talk to each other about Umbraco related topics, and for everyone interested to be able to find those discussions for a long time to come.

We think Discord is awesome for real-time chat and collaboration, for example during live events. We're planning to refocus our Discord server on community activities, social chats, office hours meetings, UmbraCollab sessions and of course: posting daily Wordle scores.

Technical discussions of Umbraco and Q&A are moving to the forum though, where we want to build a publicly searchable corpus of technical Umbraco information.

Migration

We've devised a (hopefully) smooth transition path from the old forum to the new one:

our.umbraco.com will keep existing for the foreseeable future
existing forum threads are now completely read-only, no more new topics or answers can be added
existing topics can continue though: at the bottom of each forum thread there's a button that creates a thread on the new Discourse forum

any new replies on Discourse to older topics will still appear under the existing threads on our.umbraco.com
the participants on the original thread will get a one-time notification that new replies are now available on the new Discourse forum

We believe this will lead to a smooth transition, being able to pick up any existing thread when needed but without doing a massive import of forum activity from the last 16 years (!).

What about mobile support, is there an app?

Discourse works very well in mobile browsers!

Additionally, there is the option to use it as a progressive web app (PWA) all Android browsers. You should be able to “Add to home screen” and then it acts like a native app, including notifications if you choose to enable them.

On iOS, PWA support is sadly not great, instead you can install the “Discourse Hub” app to find the Umbraco community forum.

What are some of the other features we can expect?

As modern forum software, Discourse is capable of many more things that the Our Umbraco forum could never provide. Instead of making a comprehensive list, it’s best to just jump in, read along and ask your own questions or answer some.

Along the way, the system will help you learn about available features through hints and tutorials.

I will mention 1 important feature: tags! We encourage you to help other forum users out and add at least a version tag to your new topics, but there's many more tags already available.

What about my existing account?

Making a fresh start like this does mean that we'll leave your old account behind. This is completely in line with Umbraco making a fresh start in the past year; the complete rebuild of the Umbraco backoffice also means a big refresh in Umbraco knowledge.

In order to battle the persistent spam problem we've been having, you will be asked to login using your GitHub account. That way we lean on GitHub to do initial spam filtering for us and then the anti-spam features of Discourse will be an additional layer where needed.

What about my karma?

The above means that the day has also come to say goodbye to the karma points you’ve been collecting over time. For some people this might be harder than others.

Collecting karma points has kept people who enjoy gamification going and that won’t quite stop on the new forum. For example, there’s a new leaderboard that works by people being helpful, active, and supportive.

But don’t take it too seriously, it’s just a bit of fun. In the end, we’re connecting as a community, sharing information, and that’s all that matters.

Scrreenshot of the home page of the new forum

Welcome back!

As of today we welcome you on forum.umbraco.com and we hope you continue existing discussions from Our Umbraco, as well as start many new topics.

With everything being very new, we might not have thought of everything so feel free to talk to us in the forum feedback category.