The future of the Keycloak Discourse forum - Keycloak

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The future of the Keycloak Discourse forum

July 20 2026 by GR Patil, Niko Köbler

The Keycloak project has always relied on open, searchable, community-owned discussion. Over the years, the Keycloak Discourse forum has been an important part of that: a place where users could ask configuration questions, share migration experiences, debug integrations, and find answers from people who had solved similar problems before.

After a lot of consideration, we have decided to wind down the Keycloak Discourse forum.

This is not a decision we are taking lightly. The forum contains many years of useful community knowledge, and we recognize the role it has played for Keycloak users. We also recognize that previous changes to the forum caused disruption. For that reason, we want to explain why we are making this change, how it will happen, when it will happen, and where the community should go next.

Why we are making this change

In June 2023, the Keycloak maintainers decided to sunset Discourse as one of the project’s communication channels. That decision was met with strong feedback from the community. Many users explained that Discourse filled an important role that was not fully covered by mailing lists, GitHub Discussions, or chat.

After listening to that feedback, we reactivated Discourse in October 2023.

In the years since, the way developers seek help has changed. More and more Keycloak users now turn first to AI coding assistants and search-like developer tools when they need help configuring Keycloak, troubleshooting integrations, or understanding errors. Those tools have almost certainly learned from many of the public sources the community has created over the years, including the Discourse forum, GitHub Discussions, mailing lists, documentation, blog posts, and issue trackers.

That shift has changed the role of a community forum. The old model depended on a steady flow of new questions, answers, corrections, and follow-up discussion. Without that activity, the forum risks becoming a stale support archive rather than a healthy community space.

Keeping a forum open also has a cost. It requires moderation, spam control, maintenance, upgrades, security attention, and community energy. Given the current level of engagement, we believe that effort is better focused on the places where Keycloak development and community discussion are now more active.

What will happen

We will wind down the Discourse forum in two stages.

First, there will be a two-month grace period. During this time, the forum will remain available for new posts and replies. We encourage users to review any topics they rely on, copy information they need, and move ongoing discussions to the appropriate alternative channels.

After the grace period, the forum will become archive-only. Existing content will remain readable, but users will no longer be able to create new topics or replies.

After a further three months, the forum will be shut down.

We plan to preserve the most useful content where practical. Where forum topics contain broadly useful information, we encourage the community to help move that knowledge into longer-lived places such as the Keycloak documentation, GitHub Discussions, guides, examples, or other project-maintained resources.

Timeline

The planned timeline is:

July 2026: announcement published and grace period begins

September 2026: forum becomes archive-only

December 2026: forum is shut down

If the publication date changes, the same structure will apply: two months of normal operation, followed by two months in archive-only mode, followed by shutdown.

Where to ask questions instead

The Keycloak community is not going away. We are consolidating discussion into channels that are more actively used and easier for maintainers and contributors to follow.

GitHub Discussions

Use GitHub Discussions for general questions, ideas, design discussion, and community support. This is the best replacement for most topics that would previously have gone to Discourse.

GitHub Discussions is also closer to the project’s development workflow. It makes it easier to connect a question to related issues, pull requests, releases, and design work.

GitHub Issues

Use GitHub Issues for confirmed bugs and actionable feature requests.

Before opening an issue, please use the documentation and existing discussions to check whether the behavior is expected or already reported. If you are not sure whether something is a bug, start with GitHub Discussions first.

Mailing lists

The mailing lists remain available for users and contributors who prefer email-based discussion. They are especially useful for longer-form technical discussion and project development topics.

CNCF Slack

For quick questions and real-time community discussion, join the CNCF Slack and use the...