We are excited to announce the release of the new official F-Droid forum: forum.f-droid.org.

We have been working hard to revise the website in order to make it easier to modernize, accept contributions, and internationalise. The main part of this is switching the underlying technology from WordPress to Jekyll. However, this caused us to think about the forum as it was powered by a WordPress plugin. Quickly we decided to drop the old forum in favor of an indepentently hosted one and chose some modern software called Discourse.

The old forum had a lot of disadvantages: Firstly, you cannot reply by mail. Secondly, the F-Droid volunteers had to waste time deleting massive amounts of spam (the old forum had 25% spam). Finally, the overall user experience was bad, and not only because of increasing number of bugs found in the forum software.

With Discourse, we hope to breathe life back into the F-Droid community. While app submissions recently moved to GitLab, and bug reports/feature requests still live in GitLab, the new forum is the new centre for all discussions related to F-Droid. All users of F-Droid, whether discussing the client or the server tools, can help each other there.

Because of temporary limitations of all F-Droid volunteers it was not possible to move the old forum data to the new one which means that you have to re-register yourself. Independent from this all old topics remain at the current URLs for now.

One interesting new feature is local communities. In these communities you can discuss in your mother tongue about all topics related to F-Droid and free software on Android. At the moment there is already a German group.

If you want to create your own local community, please open a topic in the “Other languages” category and we will discuss everything else there.

Finally, there is one last insight into the current development of F-Droid: we plan to use Discourse for comments on the website which gets us closer to comments on single applications.

Make sure you keep an eye on the new developments happening to F-Droid in

1. We for our part are curious if you like the new forum.