Discourse technicalities
About Discourse
Discourse is open source software, first released in 2013. From October 2025, Freegle's Discourse hosting moved to Communiteq; before that, it was self-hosted (see Discourse for background on the move). Freegle uses the open-source version, so there are no software licence fees, though we pay for hosting, backups, sending emails, and some paid geek time.
Discourse updates are notified to admins. Some can be installed by any admin; others need a geek. There may be a small amount of downtime during upgrades.
Discourse has many configuration options, controllable by admins, and can also be "programmed" via its API - which Freegle's geeks have used to set up user accounts, configure email choices, and tweak the site's appearance.
Resilience
It's important that Freegle's Discourse system is resilient and independent of the main Freegle servers, so volunteers can still communicate if those servers are down.
Before the move to Communiteq, Discourse ran on a Bytemark server separate from the main Freegle servers, in a separate data centre, with data backed up every night and copied to Google Cloud Storage: five backups kept on the Discourse server itself, and 90 days of daily backups kept in the cloud. Restoring from a backup was tested and worked, though any discussions or setting changes since the last backup would be lost. A standby Discourse instance was also kept on one of the main Freegle servers, ready to be brought into service quickly from the last good backup if needed.
You can still log in to Discourse even if MT is down, partly because Discourse remembers your login in a cookie, and partly because the Discourse server caches MT logins every 30 minutes for use if someone needs to log in while MT is unavailable.
Mail in and out
Discourse can send and receive mail, independently of Freegle's normal email systems.
Outgoing mail is sent using a Mailgun account, which costs a little each month. Incoming mail arrives at a Google-hosted mailbox called "discoursereplies", described elsewhere, which is polled every few minutes for mail to process.
To do
- Update the FAQ, Terms of Service and Privacy pages on Discourse.
- See this guidance on Discourse and GDPR.
There's plenty of help and support about Discourse at https://meta.discourse.org/.
