Today we are incrementing the version number of Discourse to 1.0.

We’ve been working on Discourse in public for about a year and a half now – since February 2013. Turns out that’s about how long it takes to herd an open source project from “hey, cool toy” to something that works for most online discussion communities.

It’s a bit like building an airplane in flight.

Version numbers are arbitrary, yes, but V1 does signify something in public. We believe Discourse is now ready for wide public use.

That’s not to say Discourse can’t be improved – I have a mile-long list of things we still want to do. But products that are in perpetual beta are a cop-out. Eventually you have to ditch the crutch of the word “beta” and be brave enough to say, yes, we’re ready.

So that’s what we’re doing.

In working with the community, in working with our 3 initial partners, in working with our early customers, we’ve gained a lot of confidence that we’ve refined Discourse into something that is safe, complete, has all the rough edges smoothed, and is finally ready for use by everyone:

discourse.org

We’re also, at long last, unveiling our hosting service and install service:

discourse.org/buy

If you’re looking for a world class host to get started with Discourse, why not choose the people that know Discourse best?

As an open source project, we wouldn’t be where we are today without our community, so many thanks are in order:

• Thanks most of all to the people who believed in Discourse enough to operate and maintain an active Discourse instance. You’re closest to the metal and we always, always highly prioritize your feedback.
• Thanks to our early customers who saw value in Discourse and were willing to take a leap of faith with us and help build a beta product. Money is the ultimate form of support, and it’s essential to the survival of the project. It’s also amazing how many things we learned when really digging into setups with our early customers.
• Thanks to everyone who participated on meta.discourse and provided feedback, reported bugs, or discussed features with us. Discourse is better because you spent the time with us to help improve it for everyone. We appreciate that.
• Thanks to our many contributors and collaborators who submitted pull requests to the Discourse project on GitHub. Any open source project is only as good as its contributors, and one of our continuing goals is to make it easier and easier to contribute to Discourse as we go.
• Thanks to everyone who used Discourse. Ultimately Discourse is a platform for having fun while communicating with your fellow human beings – building a simple, satisfying user experience has always been our number one priority. There’s no party when nobody shows up!

We’ve come a long way, and we’ve worked hard to get here, but we still have a very long way to go. Here’s to the next 8½ years of our 10 year plan to raise the level of discourse on the web. Join us. We’d love to have you.