The server side is written in Ruby on Rails and backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache.

Categories and tags can be assigned to topics which makes them follow the security rules for those if applicable.

Discobot is a customizable bot that introduces new users to many of the platform's features like bookmarking a topic, embedded link previews ("oneboxing"), emojis, mentions, basic formatting, uploading images, flagging posts, and searching.

In addition to public and private topics, users on Discourse have the ability to send personal messages to other members in the community.

When Discourse is installed, it creates automatic groups for administrators, moderators, staff, and the five trust levels.

The composer also features configurable JIT educational panels with the goal of promoting civilized discussion.

The administration dashboard's settings section allows control of appearance and behavior of the software, including fields for information about the community.

The developers maintain a getting-started guide on the support forum as well as documentation for the API endpoints.

The developers welcome peer audits of the open source code and encourage reporting security issues.

DiscourseHub is the official, open source Discourse application for Android and iOS devices.

Co-founder Jeff Atwood announced in 2013 that Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. had obtained initial venture capital funding from First Round, Greylock, and SV Angel.

[5] With the money, the company pays salaries for its full-time employees who maintain the software and develop new features.

This is an example of an open source software business model where a company sells professional services to willing customers.

As of March 2022, the developers shared that more than 3000 businesses or instances have chosen the official Discourse hosting which CDCK provides as software as a service.