In August 2024, Algolia will retire our Discourse forums. After eight years as the cornerstone of the Algolia Community, it’s bittersweet to see them go, but there is also a silver lining. Today, we’ll look back at the community’s history and look forward to where we’re headed next.

A bit of history

If you aren’t familiar with it, the Algolia Community Forum opened its doors to the public way back in November 2016. It was a place for developers to get technical questions answered, show off new projects, and generally goof off with Algolians and other members of the dev community. A personal favorite post from this time was an April Fool’s joke announcing a new CSS search client. 😀

Fast-forward to when I arrived at Algolia three years ago. At the time, you could still go to the forums and read the latest announcements from our Product Managers or ask a technical question (often answered by me!), but it no longer had that sense of community. Something needed to change.

The next chapter

At Algolia DevCon 2023, we asked the developer community what you wanted. You told us that these days, you prefer chat-style platforms to forums. Interestingly enough, our internal developers did, too. So we launched our official Algolia Discord Server in December of 2023 as a new community hub. We did a lot of research, and Discord appealed to us because of its supports a combination of synchronous chat channels alongside threaded forums (similar to Discourse). It was a great compromise that allowed us to keep the best of both worlds.

Discord also allowed us to bring three separate but equally important groups of devs into one place:

• Our Algolia Ambassadors (who used to hang out on Slack)
• Our DocSearch users
• Our wider developer community

So far, it’s been an enormous success! We have a community of over 500 devs engaging in compelling conversations, showing off cool Algolia use cases, and, (of courses), helping to solve each other’s technical and design issues.

So let’s all give a moment of silence for our old forums, but let’s not mourn them. Instead, let’s celebrate the new thriving community on the Algolia Discord server!

I hope to see you there soon!