Sunsetting Our Discourse Instance 

After 5 years, we are shutting down the HackerNoon Discourse Instance on April 14th of 2023. It has been a good run creating this community with some thoughtful people. It's essential for us that our contributors have a community to come to and share their insights with our editors. Our ultimate goal was always to promote communication and to help each one publish better online. After a careful analysis, we decided it was time to move to community communication channels that we can better control and iterate on within our own CMS.

Why we're saying farewell to Discourse on community.hackernoon.com

After so many years by our side, it's only fair that we share with you the reasons behind this decision. We hope this clarification further supports your trust in HackerNoon, and how we intend to continue to create a strong relationship with our users.

SSO Troubles

It’s just easier when the primary account is tied directly to the primary database first. People who came to our site through Discourse URL (formerly, https://community.hackernoon.com) consistently had bugs, and then information on their HackerNoon profiles struggled to pass over to their additional Discourse profile pages. It just always felt like the software wanted to be the visitors’ primary account instead of a supplemental experience to your site’s primary offering.

Too Many Features Overlap with HackerNoon CMS

HackerNoon spent the last five years making a community-driven content management system. As we grow our reader, writer, editor, and business accounts, we want to develop our relationships in specific ways, so it makes more sense to natively power most community-driven functionality.

Consequently, our discourse instance overlaps with other features, such as search, native comments, reactions, and moderation - all of which serve the same purpose of community engagement. Thus, our native Discourse community's utility has become redundant. While it lasted, Discourse was a fun solution to quickly hack together a comment system (thanks Boing Boing for the idea).

What Happens to Content?

• Despite our decision, you'll never have to worry about lost content. All public content will be backed up forever, and user data will be deleted 30 days after the shutdown - you can rest easy. We'd never throw away something as precious as your thoughts.

• As of 14 April 2023, if you wish to recover your content, let us know by sending an email to [email protected] with the subject 'Recover Content from Discourse Instance community.' We'll be sure to contact you as soon as possible and get your insights back to you.

  
  

Sunsetting the Community Page

All in all, Discourse provides great software for running forums and discussions with online communities. However, it just isn’t a fit for HackerNoon and the platform we are building.

That being said, the HackerNoon community is still here! Please keep sharing your wisdom and thoughts on our various communities here.

Let's keep on discussing all of your favorite topics!

Thank you all for being a part of the HackerNoon community!