Welcome to the new Treehouse Forum!

We've been thinking about how we want the forum to work for a long time, and while we're only scratching the surface of those plans with this first release, we think we've got a great foundation to build on.

The forum works very similarly to how things functioned on our previous Facebook group at its core, but we're expanding on that functionality here to smooth the rough edges that we've seen with Facebook. The forum index displays a stream of all forum posts. We think that's been a great thing for the community on Facebook, because it helps everyone see where the activity is. Unfortunately, that single stream was hard to filter, so our forum's launching with tags to help you find posts relating to topics that you find most important, and with toggles for listing posts by newest or by most active.

One thing we've wanted for a long time in the forums is the ability to post using Markdown. Posting code in Facebook is a nightmare, and we love posting with Markdown on sites like Github and Stack Overflow, so we're using Markdown as our format for posts in the Treehouse Forum. By every post and comment box there's help for Markdown, so it should be a piece of cake to pick up, but if you ever feel like you'd like more info about using Markdown, definitely shoot our team a message or just ask here on the forum.

The forum is available for posting and commenting to anyone who's currently a member of Treehouse. We're not making it a wide open forum for a few reasons. First off, we want our forum to be the best possible place on the web to talk about the topics that Treehouse covers. Allowing anyone on the web to get involved could certainly help that cause, but it would also open up the typical spam control can of worms. Additionally, every day we focus on creating special experiences for Treehouse members, and we believe that making the forum members only, like the Facebook group was intended to be, will keep the community connected and strong and help us all to continue building each other up on our learning and career journeys.

We're amazingly grateful for everyone's involvement in the Facebook group and for the amazing sense of community you've all built there. We're certainly not closing that group down, but our sincere hope is that everyone will love and begin using the new Treehouse Forum instead. I can't wait to see where we all are after another year of answering questions, giving feedback, and sharing ideas through the forum. Thank you!