This is a quick look at the navigation and reading features that are new in Discourse, or that work differently enough from Khoros to be worth knowing about.
For the full walkthrough, see Finding Answers — Search, Navigation & Filtering.
The sidebar is now your home base. Navigation has moved from the top of the page to the left sidebar. Your categories, tags, and followed content are all there at a glance — and you can customise it to pin the sections you use most (under More > Customize this section, and by clicking on the pen icon next to the Tags).
Tags work across the whole forum. In Khoros, content lived inside sub-forums. In Discourse, tags let a topic belong to a category and carry labels that span the entire community.
If there’s a part of product or a theme you want to track, following its tag is often more useful than following a single category.
There’s a progress bar on the right. When reading a topic, a vertical timeline on the right side of the screen shows exactly where you are in the conversation. Drag it to jump to any point instantly.
The forum remembers where you stopped reading. Click into any topic and you’ll land at your last read position, not the top. In a long thread, this means you never lose your place — even if you come back days later.
You can summarise long threads with AI. On any long topic, look for the Summarize button near the top. It generates a concise digest of the key points — useful when a thread has been running for a while and you need to catch up fast.
And you don’t have time to get into it now, but still want to come back to the topic and read the whole conversation, you can Bookmark a topic.
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Click the bookmark icon on any post (you may find it under the … menu).
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Optionally pick a reminder — for example later today, tomorrow, next week, or a custom date and time.
That’s it for the Navigation & Reading highlights: happy exploring, and see you in the threads!