<!-- Old GitHub one-line description: - Discussion forums with Question & Answers and Team Chat features. Plus embedded comments for your blog. Current: - Open source StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit, Disqus hybrid — for your online community. Other alternatives?: - Community software, brings together the best from StackOverflow + Slack + Reddit + Discourse. - Online community software. Find ideas and answers together, and pick the right things to do, to change society, or grow your startup. -->

Talkyard

Forum software, with chat, and anonymous comments.

• Thoughtful discussions.  Insightful comments rise to the top.
• Upvote ideas.  Sort by votes.
• Question-Answers.  Discuss, select an answer.
• Chat channels.  Pretty basic features.
• Blog comments.  Listen to your readers.

<!-- Community discussion platform, or Structured discussion platform? A/B test? Or "Structured discussions, for your community — Talkyard brings together ..." ? A structured discussions platform — brings together the main features from StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit/HackerNews, and Disqus blog comments. --> <!-- Create a place to talk, where your audience find answers to their questions, and discuss ideas.<br> Place it at `talkyard.Your-Website.org`. - **Solve problems** step by step, in traditional flat forum topics. - **Save time.** People find help "instantly", in Question & Answers topics. - **Crowdsource feedback and ideas.** Discuss, upvote, choose the right things to do. - **Collaborate,** in team chats. - **Talk with your blog readers,** in embedded comments. For your co-workers / customers / students / volunteers / contributors / users. You can use Slack and Mattermost etc for day to day teamwork, combined with Talkyard for the more important discussions that you want to find in a nice-to-read format, months and years later. Or use Talkyard for customer support, or for schools and students helping each other. -->

How does it compare with other software?   <a href="https://business.talkyard.io/compare/">Find out here</a>.<!-- StackOverflow for Teams, Discourse, Slack, Facebook Groups, Disqus? -->
Self-Hosting:  See talkyard-prod-one <!-- Or use our hosting service: https://www.talkyard.io. -->
Demo:  https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io
Discussion forum:  https://forum.talkyard.io
Documentation:  https://docs.talkyard.io (incomplete)<!-- Features: Copy a https://www.talkyard.io/compare/(something) page and show only Ty? -->
Development:  That's this repo! See: docs/developing-talkyard.md

<!-- Immich has these links: https://github.com/immich-app/immich Documentation About Installation Roadmap Demo (although there's a Demo paragraph just below!) Features (although there's a Features list just below) Translations Contributing --> <!-- For your students / volunteers / colleagues / customers / donors / open source users / city / community. --> <!-- - **Improve your API docs**, by embedding comments at the end of each docs page, to make it easy for people to ask and tell you if something is unclear. --> <!-- (The staff configure the topic type just once, in a per category setting.) --> <!-- Use Talkyard for your workplace, as a self building FAQ. Or for customer support. Or for your teachers and students, to help each other. Or your non-profit volunteers. Or an open source project and its users. We'd like to build a tool tha *people who change the world or their neighborhood* can use to solve problems and pick the right things to do. That's why we have find-solutions Question-Answers topics, and HackerNews & Reddit type topics where good ideas rise to the top.<! - — And you can use this tool, for your workplace and your colleagues & customers, or your non-profit and its volunteers, or an open source project and its users, or a school and its students, etc. --> <!-- Talkyard (formerly EffectiveDiscussions) is discussion forum software, with chat and question-answers features. And embedded comments for static websites / blogs. Inspired by Discourse, Slack, StackOverflow, Reddit and Hacker News, Disqus. --> <!-- ### Project size It's sort of possible for one person to understand all of Talkyard — as May 2021, `https://github.com/boyter/scc` says Talkyard is 140 000 (111 359 + 32 653 = 144 012) lines of code and comments (excluding blank lines). **and** that was with some other changes, different branch. Plus about 60 000 (59 425) lines test code. Server side code complexity: 5538, client side (a React.js web app): 8478. scc modules/ed-core/src modules/ty-dao-rdb/src/ client/app-* client/embedded-comments/ client/serviceworker/ client/*.ts app/ s/ Makefile to-talkyard/src/ gulpfile.js images/web/ty-lua/ images/web/*.conf images/app/Dockerfile.* images/rdb/ scc tests/ -->

Features

Good comments rise to the top

Find the interesting stuff, also in big discussions. <br/><br/>

<table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/2017--estimate-unfamiliar-task.jpg" /> </td></tr></table> <!-- SVG doesn't seem to work at GitHub: <svg width="100%" height="600" xmlns="www.w3.org"> <rect x="0" y="0" width="100%" height="100%" fill="#222" stroke="none" stroke-width="2"/> <image y="3%" href="... something ..." width="100%" height="94%" /> </svg> --> <!--   --> <!--  -->

Tags with values

Create your own tags with values, list and sort by value.

For example, a priority tag: tags:priority:desc>2 is:open, here: https://forum.talkyard.io/-/search?q=tags:priority:desc%3E2+is:open <br/> <br/>

Upvote ideas

<table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/upvote-ideas--aqua-planet-mind-writing-b0a--blue-marks--dimmed.png" /> </td></tr></table> <br/> <table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/2026-01--upvote-ideas-settings.png" /> </td></tr></table> <br/>

Anonymous comments

So e.g. students can post embarassing questions. Or for anonymous feedback, etc.

<table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/2026-01--anon-disc.png" /> </td></tr></table> <br/> <table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/2026-01--anon-never-always-menu.png" /> </td></tr></table> <br/> <table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/2026-01--anon-purpose-menu.png" /> </td></tr></table> <br>

Chat

Notifications via email, as of now.

<table><tr><td> <!-- /images/web/ty-media/for-docs/2017-09-12-chat-ex.jpeg --> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/bf78d26ec3f4da976d9c694a660d40b718d86043/for-docs/2017-09-12-chat-ex.jpeg" alt="A chat channel"/> </td></tr></table> <br> <!--  --> <!--  --> <!-- Hacker News / Reddit style discussion:  --> <!-- **Admin-getting-started guide:**  <br> -->

Users online

<br>

Avoid mistakes

There's a Disagree button. <!-- See if others disagree with something. so you can avoid following the wrong advice. -->

<table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/penguins-can-fly.jpg"/> </td></tr></table> <!--   --> <br>

Big discussions

Find new replies by clicking Recent in the sidebar, when you return to a discussion a day later.

<!-- (But at GitHub, Reddit, HackerNews, you need to skim the whole discussion from top to bottom to see if anything new has appeared.) --> <table><tr><td> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/talkyard-media/bf78d26ec3f4da976d9c694a660d40b718d86043/for-docs/2019-08-10-recent-replies-ex-anon-arw.jpg" /> </td></tr></table> <!--  -->

Jump to the parent comment and back:

<!-- Doesn't work: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/jump-and-save-time.mp4 <video width="500" data-height="260" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/debiki/ty-media/refs/heads/p/m/9/for-docs/jump-and-save-time.mp4"></video> But uploading via GitHub's user interface works: (url must be in its ow