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.
If you’re not doing it, someone else will I’m also curious about NASA and Julia, that sounds pretty cool. (For what) is NASA using Julia?
Just my two cents on the topic of this thread though: I don’t think it’s a big restriction as anyone is free to open a “general discussion and appreciation about Julia 1.13” thread (EDIT: Congrats for Julia 1.13! ). I also really like the This Month in the Julia World newsletter which sparks some positive feedback and general appreciation, which does a similar thing.
But the release announcements are automated messages (I guess?) and it feels like most questions (even small ones) about the overall release that have clear answers or spark interesting discussions are better suited in their own threads in the long term.
Still, I think the community engagement is worth it. And a little bit of occasional chaos is also not the end of the world. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re still alive!
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake
And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun
For the people who are still alive
Those messages aren’t automated! And I think that’s also part of it; Alex and Kristoffer would get inundated with notifications as the original poster, too… asking them directly how to update.
Nothing prevents you from making separate posts if you want to. The first of those posts followed directly from this post, and I have a strong hunch the second one did as well.
There are at least a couple of active people here that wouldn’t mind answering those simple questions, myself included. Those types of simple installation questions have completely disappeared since the coming of AI anyway. I’m sure they would also appreciate seeing some appreciation for all their hard work? Here’s a poll:
This could probably be addressed by just modifying automated messaging on release threads. Drop something like this at the bottom of each before the closure.
Release threads on this forum are automatically closed so that discussions may be organized into more specific thread topics and so the release announcer is not inundated with hundreds of reply notifications. That said, please do open new topics to ask for help with or show appreciation for this new release! We’d love to hear from you!
I’m also curious about NASA and Julia, that sounds pretty cool. 
