Will be performing scheduled maintenance on September 20th, 2026.
What is happening?
As shown in the release timeline above, we will be upgrading our community forum software (Discourse) from version v2026.1 ESR to v2026.7 ESR. This upgrade is necessary to ensure we remain on a fully supported version and can take advantage of the latest features, bug fixes, and security patches.
What to expect:
The forums will be temporarily placed in read-only mode while the upgrade is in progress and will be unreachable for up to 30 mins in total.
I’m not yet able to se a specific start time, however its likely to be early morning or late night.
Thank you for your patience as we aim to keep our community running smoothly!
Wishing you an uneventful activity! I’m 99.9999% certain that you’ll backup and use best practices. Hopefully this will be a straightforward and uneventful scheduled maintenance; best wishes!
Update: the upgrade is happening now, ahead of schedule.
Traffic is low this weekend, which makes it a better window than the one I originally picked. Also time availability for me will be worse next weekend. It’s been a crazy last few weeks actually.
Rather than wait for the 20th, I’m starting the upgrade to Discourse v2026.7 ESR now.
What to expect:
The forum will be unreachable for roughly 10–15 minutes while the server rebuilds. And in read-only mode much of that time. Nothing is lost. All topics, posts, and accounts come through untouched.
After it’s back, you’ll notice a few things:
The post editor may now have rich text formatting on by default. Markdown still works exactly as it always has, you can toggle the default back.
Some layout polish, and the mobile and desktop views are now a single responsive design.
If anything looks broken or behaves oddly after the upgrade, please reply here and I’ll take a look.
It’s been a week with the new ESR v2026.7 of Discourse. Seems no issues so far. As such, I’ve enabled the soon to be mandatory features from Discourse.
This includes the following noticabled changes (screenshots from the backend and example from of the front end change):
