A forum software is a group of people interested in a common topic who are willing to type paragraphs to each other on a web page. Forums are a fundamental building block of web community.

Discourse is the 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform. Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today – both from a technology standpoint and a sociology standpoint.

Discourse is a JavaScript application that runs in your web browser, using the Ember.js JavaScript framework.

The server side of Discourse is written in Ruby on Rails with a Postgres database.