Hey community! 
Andrew here from the Google Cloud Community team. I’m pumped to share that we’re moving our forums to a new home on Discourse at the end of the month!
You, our community members, are what makes this community thrive. You share invaluable, hard-won lessons and support each other every day. Based on your feedback over the past few years, we’ve listened closely and are excited to introduce this new platform designed to enhance those connections and conversations.
What’s changing?
At the end of the month we are migrating the Google Cloud, Workspace, AppSheet, and Looker communities to a new, unified platform as part of the Google Developer Program.
Many of you shared that you value function over form – and that you wanted robust markdown, powerful search capabilities, and efficient keyboard shortcuts. We chose Discourse because it excels in these areas and is built for deep, technical discussions.
What can you look forward to?
- Advanced Markdown: Enjoy a richer writing experience with full markdown and code highlighting support.
- A Smarter Forum: The new forum leverages Gemini to help you find relevant content, discover related topics, and even get the “gist” of a conversation with topic summaries.
- Display Name + Optional Full Name: You’ll have a public username, and you can also choose to display your full name. While completely optional, sharing your name is a great way to foster trust and build stronger connections within this community.
- Dark Mode! No sunglasses needed.
And you’ll be seeing active participation from Googlers across various teams, including the Cloud, AppSheet, Workspace, and Looker teams. Many familiar and new folks are committed to engaging, answering questions, and channeling your feedback.
Regarding existing content, we are committed to migrating all public posts, replies, and user profiles from our forums. Existing post URLs will redirect to their new location.
What’s next
This is the first of several updates. Tomorrow, I’ll share a post detailing the migration plan, the cutover schedule, and more about the new experience.
We are pouring a ton of energy into building a better home for this community—one with the right tools and the right people to help us all succeed. If you have any questions, please post them below. My team and I will be here to answer them.
-Andrew
Really excited to see the new forum and explore its new features.