Should we have a whole releases category in here?

Django Internals
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Hiya,

I like releases being announced here: Django Release Announcements

But I’m finding that the thread there isn’t aging too well. It feels like we could have a whole category, and then one topic per release (set), rather than (forever?) just adding to the one topic.

How do others feel about this?

I guess @nessita and @jacobtylerwalls, you’re the ones most directly affected.

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Django Release Announcements
Django Fellow Report - Natalia - 2025
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I wasn’t requested for opinion, but just wanted to point out:

If this ever change, will the threads still be locked?
Maybe if they’re open they might end up as a bug report thread related to the release? Not sure if this would be either benefical or not.

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In general +1. Sometimes I get jumped to the bottom of the massive page, others times not.

We may find out in a few days whether we will need a dedicated feed for security release announcements as a requirement for becoming a CNA. If so, that might affect how we decide to break this down (release set or by security or both).

By release set did you mean for example 6.0.x or 6.x?

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Sorry, yes, I see that’s ambiguous.

I meant per release day really.

Imagine you’re realising four versions. I don’t want you updating four threads. Just posting once.

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You read my mind :brain:

For a while now I have thought that having a single thread with all release announcements does not scale or age well. I would also like to see a “security release” feed that people can subscribe to without having to follow every patch (or pre) release. Whether that is a separate “Security Releases” thread or a tag (does such a thing exist?), I am not sure. But as Jacob mentioned, we are also actively working on becoming a CNA and I think our presence as such would benefit from having a dedicated security-announcement channel. This would include releases themselves but also other relevant security-related bits, such as the one-week pre-notification or notices that newer versions of Python are available that fix a performance or security issue in a library we rely on.

I think I would prefer either a thread per release group (security releases, feature pre and final releases, patch releases perhaps?) or else a post per release with proper tagging. The latter would mean enabling and using tagging features in Discourse so we can cleanly filter by type.

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Ah-ha, great. You’re way ahead of me @nessita. Sounds like you’ve got a good idea of what’ll be needed…

Let me just leave a +1 here for when you’re ready to act on your plans.

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Just to add one other benefit is that forum categories automatically have an RSS feed version which would allow for people to subscribe to that category to hear about releases when they happen.

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That would also allow other communities (such as discord servers) make a channel subscribed to the RSS feed, and that would be really great!

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Indeed someone asked for exactly this in the Discord in the last handful of days.

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We already have an “Announcements” category. Would we want to create a subcategory for “Releases”, rather than a whole new category?

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12

Thank you @KenWhitesell for that suggestion, I think is a good idea. How about:

  • Creating a new subcategory “Releases” under Announcements.
  • Having one topic per release day/event/set, rather than a single long thread.
  • Tagging release posts with either:
    • security (for security releases),
    • A.B.x (for the corresponding series),
    • and possibly other tags as we refine the scheme.

This structure would make it easier to browse past releases, link to specific announcements, and eventually support a dedicated security release feed if needed.

(Tagging features should be enabled, which I have done to see how they work and how we can use them. Right now tag creation is restricted to a very small set of users until we have a clearer plan.)

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I like that proposal.

Pre-releases get scheduled separately from everything else, so we could have a second subcategory for just those.

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(Cross post from Django Release Announcements - #107 by nessita)

Given the recent discussion and consensus in Should we have a whole releases category in here?, Django releases will now be announced in a new subcategory:

Each release will have its own topic. For security releases, the security tag will be applied. For example, to view all security release posts, you can use this query:

https://forum.djangoproject.com/tags/c/announcements/releases/31/security

A new subcategory has also been created to track pre-releases for each feature version:

Tags will be used to identify and filter pre-releases by feature version.

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I’m not sure the where best place to highlight this would be, but one nice advantage of this is that Discourse generates an RSS feed for each category and tag.

I have setup a channel on Discord for the releases category, but there are likely other opportunities here

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