Currently every new release thread (beta or otherwise) is immediately closed.
I want to suggest keeping it open instead. With all the concerns around dropping community engagement, this seems like a quick win. It allows us to ask questions about new features, providing authors a chance to elaborate and discuss, and most of all show appreciation for cool new features.
This is inspired by the Home Assistant release announcements: 2026.9: There's room on this bus - Home Assistant. Release announcements always have a corresponding Discourse release discussion thread. These tend to get hundreds, or with big changes, even thousands of replies.
+1 and I have found it odd as well why these specific announcements are closed, but e.g., package announcements are not. It feels like the natural place to discuss the new release, given that that’s what the julia discourse is about: primarily human discussions and not data dumps (the ultra long ‘dont wanna read llm’ thread made this clear).
We used to do this. You can see what release topics looked like before the change. Most responses were things that had been asked a thousand times (“how do I update”). We were finding bug reports were getting lost in the fray. Both things are best as dedicated topics. Yes, needing to start a topic to respond is a barrier to entry… but it also helps folks find existing topics!
Release thread is not primarily intended to get support. It’s intended to discuss new features. For example, I saw in the release post that part of the development was supported by NASA. So I wanted to ask, is NASA using Julia? I’m not going to make a new post for that, but it’s a small enough question for a release thread. I also see plenty of the type of responses I was hoping for, including a lot of appreciation. Support questions can always easily be split into new topics anyway.
