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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For quick questions and real-time community discussion, join the CNCF Slack and use the Keycloak channels (#keycloak, #keycloak-dev). Slack is useful for lightweight help and coordination, but it is not a good long-term knowledge base. When a discussion produces information that others will need later, please consider moving the conclusion to GitHub Discussions or documentation.
For durable answers, guides and documentation are still the best destinations. If a forum answer helped you understand a common Keycloak configuration, migration, extension point, or troubleshooting pattern, consider contributing an improvement to the documentation.
This helps future users more than another forum reply would, because documentation is versioned, reviewed, and easier to maintain as Keycloak evolves.
The Discourse forum contains a large amount of historical information. Some of it is still useful. Some of it is outdated. Keycloak has changed significantly over the years, and older answers may no longer apply to current versions.
For that reason, we encourage users to treat forum content as historical context rather than authoritative documentation. The Keycloak documentation, release notes, GitHub Discussions, and current project channels should be used for up-to-date guidance.
During the grace period and archive-only period, we encourage the community to identify valuable forum topics and help move the durable knowledge into better-maintained locations.
Good candidates include:
common configuration patterns
migration notes between Keycloak versions
troubleshooting steps for frequent errors
extension examples
deployment and clustering guidance
identity brokering and protocol integration examples
answers that are still valid for current Keycloak releases
We want to thank everyone who contributed to the Discourse forum over the years.
Every question, answer, correction, workaround, and explanation helped someone. In many cases, it helped far more people than the original poster, because the content was discoverable by search and reused by the wider community.
The forum was valuable because the community made it valuable.
This change is not a rejection of that history. It is a recognition that the way people find help, contribute knowledge, and participate in open source communities has changed. We want to focus our energy on channels that are active, sustainable, and better connected to the future of the project.
Thank you for helping make Keycloak better, and thank you for helping us carry the best of the forum’s knowledge into the next phase of the community.