Hi Everyone 
Can you believe the forum turns ten this month!? Hasn’t time just flown by!? A lot has happened over the last decade and we’ve got a bumper update for you with more giveaways and discounts than ever, but before we get to all that let’s start with a quick overview of some of our milestones and a little on how we got here.
In 10 years we’ve…
- Sent out just under 10M emails!
- Served over 100M pageviews! (That’s 100 times more than our entire first year!)
- Given away over $100,000 worth of prizes to our members!
You’ve also…
- Posted almost 400K times!
- Created over 40K threads!
- Handed out almost half a million likes!
- Collectively, visited the forum over 2.5M days!!
Pretty cool, huh!?
As you’ve probably noticed this forum isn’t like most programming language forums. In fact it’s not like all that many forums at all - we’re a dynamic platform that has continually evolved and changed as our goals, responsibilities and the way you use the forum has. You may not realise it, but how you’ve taken part on the forum has played an important role in how it has turned out.
And we’ve turned out pretty different.
To see why, let’s take a look at what some of our goals and responsibilities have been and how that’s shaped our policies and moderation guidelines.
At its simplest, a forum like this is a place for people to come together and help each other. But by itself that’d result in us being not much more than a chat room, so with various policies we turned your news, discussions, and questions and answers into a highly accessible high quality resource. But you don’t have to take our word for it, here’s what @Nicd said a while back:
Thank you for the kind words @Nicd! 
One of the ways in which we achieved this was with a relentless focus on SEO. Our SEO has been so good in fact, that we often get traffic that may not be entirely Elixir-specific. A very recent example was us seeing a spike of 5 times our usual traffic for a couple of days at the beginning of December, where when searching Advent of Code forum search engines were returning us in one of the top spots. SEO at this level isn’t just great for when you need a quick answer, it’s also great for adoption because it means more people get to hear about Elixir… all while seeing for themselves just how cool and vibrant the community is!
Speaking of adoption, it’s been no secret that this is something we’ve factored into our policies since pretty much the beginning, and again, in all sorts of ways. One of which we just mentioned; by becoming a high quality, accessible, and free resource. It was so effective and stood out so much in fact, that we’d see comments like this:
But it’s not the only important factor when it comes to adoption. Vibe and community feel matters too. A lot. What’s more attractive, a stuffy, clinical community or one that oozes the sort of buzz, excitement and activity that gives it an air of something special? We hope you agree it’s the latter!
Here too you have played an incredibly important role - and roles you’ve all most certainly had - from those of you who have logged on day in day out and answered questions almost as quickly as they were getting posted, to those who have shared exciting news or happily imparted years, sometimes decades of experience and knowledge through thoughtfully crafted and considered responses. Even those of you who have gone around acknowledging what others have said (even if just by liking their posts) have added tremendous value. We say it every year, but if you have participated on the forum in any kind of positive way you have helped make it what it is and have helped Elixir get to where it has. Thank you!
With the forum quickly becoming the place to hang out for many in the community and with the community growing at such a fast pace, our goals and responsibilities had to include reflecting and representing you (and Elixir) in the best possible light. Here we had to balance things like everyone’s right to share their opinions while at the same time considering everything that is needed to support and shepherd the community in a positive direction. One way to do this is by setting the forum up so that we set you up for success, by guiding you via things like thread templates, the arrangement and visibility of categories, setting an example, and a whole host of other things such as our zero tolerance policy on negative personal remarks or how to participate in general, such as when/how to post news, updates, blogs etc (in a structured, easy to digest and non-grating or spammy manner). Setting you up for success sets the forum up for success and that’s better for everyone - when you succeed, we succeed, and the entire community (and Elixir!) are better off for it!
Here’s three optimisations we implemented to support some of this:
- Optimised for readability (for, and to encourage, power users, i.e those who participate daily or very frequently) - things that supported this: Descriptive titles (you shouldn’t have to click on a thread to see what it’s about), high quality posts that contain enough info to get an idea of what the user is asking or trying to say, one thread per library or project with all updates in it, links containing adequate details of what’s at the URL, etc.
- Optimised for SEO - all of the above plus: discouraging LQ/spammy posts or threads, zapping spam, helping users feel a sense of pride in their posts (via things like the forum and post design) to encourage higher quality contributions, etc.
- Optimised for community building - things that support this include our Members Only section and MOTY scheme, along with encouraging respectful contributions that lift people up and echo sincerity, kindness, patience, understanding, and a general spirit of camaraderie. When one member of the community feels good, it has a knock on effect for the rest of us.
The above (and a whole host of other things we’ve done) may not seem like much by themselves, but piece by piece, all together, they add up, and they make the difference between a good forum (/community) and a great one.
There’s lots more we could talk about (for instance how some of our policies and preemptive moderation has helped avoid inter and cross community issues from developing, or how mindful we’ve been about the impact of buzz and activity on people like Josè, Chris and and every other project creator and maintainer) but hopefully the above gives you some idea of the reasoning behind some of our policies and why this forum has turned out fairly remarkably different.
Again, you don’t need to take our word for it:
But why are we telling you this?
We’ve specifically covered the items above for two main reasons:
- It’s our tenth birthday! You may have wondered why this forum is different and how we’ve approached things to intentionally make it different, and..
- We are about to enter a new phase in the life of the forum - because of LLMs and the impact of addictive social media algorithms on our brain chemistry.
In short, we are about to see a seismic shift in the way people use forums like this, just like we did on other forums with the advent of social networks. But don’t panic! This isn’t our first rodeo!
Luckily, we no longer need to worry about a lot of the things we’ve put so much effort into over the years because, thanks to everyone’s hard work, Elixir is now a fully established language 
Additionally, Elixir becoming more and more mainstream means the ecosystem is growing at a fast pace with new libraries and frameworks popping up left right and centre, and that means we need a better system to accommodate this growth and reflect this new stage of Elixir adoption …something you may have actually heard us talk about previously when we’ve mentioned things like creating a custom community platform to accommodate our specific needs.
In other words, we were heading in the direction we are about to go in anyway, LLMs have just nudged us into that direction a little sooner.
We’ll still be using Discourse (for now) and we’ll post an announcement about these changes when they’re complete - but to give you a bit of a heads up we’ll be making the forum easier to post on and will be moving away from some of our policies, like the one where we preferred a single thread for each library or project with all updates having to be posted in it.
So if you spot any changes over the next few weeks that look out of the ordinary, don’t be alarmed - just post in whichever sections you feel make sense and we’ll post an announcement when we’ve finished experimenting and have found a new happy place - one to see us through the foreseeable future and to our custom platform!
Let’s now get back to our birthday and annual update.
Buckle up, because it’s a bumper update this year! 
2026 Giveaways!
Our giveaways are back, and we’ve got more for you than ever!!
Not one.
Not two.
But THREE additional giveaways this year!! 
-
Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from PragProg - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from Manning - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win a year’s worth of ElixirCasts Alchemist’s Edition! - Worth $228!
-
NEW: Win a course from the Pragmatic Studio! - Worth up to $200!
-
NEW: Win a year’s worth of AppSignal! - Worth $279!
Don’t forget to check out our amazing sponsors who help make all this possible! and for those of you who want even more chances to win, we have similar giveaways on Devtalk and the Erlang Forums too:
Devtalk Giveaways
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Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from PragProg - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from Manning - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win a course from the Pragmatic Studio!! - Worth up to $200!
Erlang Forums Giveaways
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Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from PragProg - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win ANY Elixir or Erlang ebook from Manning - TWO winners every month!!
-
Win a copy of Build It with Nitrogen - One winner every month!!
ElixirCasts Winners
To make the giveaways a bit easier to manage we moved some of them to annual giveaways (instead of monthly giveaways). If your name is listed below you won in the ElixirCasts giveaway! Please PM @AstonJ with your: Full name, email address, and country of residence and we’ll get your details sent over to the ElixirCasts team!
2026 Discounts!!
We’ve teamed up with our friends to bring you even more discounts this year! Some are a birthday-treat - so snap them up while they last!
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35% off any ebook published by PragProg!
Simply use our Devtalk coupon codedevtalk.com -
50% off any two or more Elixir ebooks published by Manning!
Special Birthday offer for a limited time only! Simply head over to: Elixir Forum's ten-year anniversary Book Bundle (once two Elixir books are added… you can even add non-Elixir books to continue saving!) -
45% off any ebook published by Manning!
Simply use our Devtalk coupon codedevtalk.com -
10% off ElixirCasts… for life!
Simply use coupon codeelixirforum -
20% off ANY Pragmatic Studio course!
Simply use our Devtalk coupon codedevtalk.com -
10% off AppSignal… for 12 months!
Simply use coupon codeelixirforum -
10% off Honeybadger… for 12 months!
Mention Elixir Forum when you sign up for 10% off your first year following a 30-day free trial.
Members of the Year!
Our MOTY scheme is one of our most loved initiatives and it’s back again this year, with 50 MOTYs! Remember, these are awarded purely based on forum participation - so get involved if you want to be considered for this highly prestigious award 
2025 Members of the Year!
With us fast approaching 30k members it’s difficult to whittle this list down to just 50 because we have so many amazing members - so please forgive us if we missed you! We’ve done our best to select based on the most active posters, those with the most accepted solutions, likes, posts, etc.
If you’re named here, thank you and well done! Please also read the bit at the end as we have an eBook for you!
As a thank you, we have an ebook for each of our winners! We have 25 books from PragProg and 25 from Manning so if you are listed above, please PM @AstonJ with your first choice from one publisher and your backup choice from the other, as well as your full name, country of residence and email address - we’ll then allocate these on a first come first serve basis 
(They don’t have to be an Elixir book either, they can be any book so long as they are published by either PragProg or Manning.)
A quick review of 2025
To keep this post from getting too long we’ll quickly share that we had another record breaking year last year, where we served a massive 4M pageviews in a single month!! (You might remember that in last year’s update we said we broke our records by serving 2.5M in a single month!)
On a community level we also saw the introduction of three new frameworks (Popcorn, Nex and Beam Bots), and TideWave was released by José and Phoenix.new by Chris. We also saw other cool libraries like Hobbes (a scalable, fault-tolerant transactional record store), Bedrock (a scaleable, distributed key-value database with better-than-ACID guarantees), Localize (the next generation localisation library for Elixir), and many more. Bart also got funding by the EEF and Curiosum took him on full time to work on Hologram. We even saw Elixir expansions into other languages, with the Oban team introducing a Python version of Oban, drawing attention to Elixir via one of the biggest programming languages around! Be sure to check the latest Elixir and Erlang News so you’re all caught up there too!
So all in all, 2025 was another fantastic year for Elixir and another record breaking year for the forum - well done y’all!
Forum plans for 2026
As mentioned earlier we will be making some fairly big changes to the way the forum is structured this year, these changes should make the forum easier to post on, moderate, and closer in line to what we had planned for our custom platform. Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement soon!
Wrapping up
The last ten years have just flown by, and it’s been a real honour serving one of the smartest, most vibrant and nicest communities around. We hope you like what we’ve done on the forum and we hope you’ve enjoyed being a part of it - you really have helped shape it into what it has become and we’ve loved being on this journey with you. We couldn’t have asked for a better community and we’re excited to see where we’ll all be ten years from now.
One thing is for sure, wherever it is it will be somewhere awesome 
Thank you all for an amazing ten years! 
Birthday Celebrations! 
We’ve teamed up with our friends to bring you an extra special birthday update - we have the following to give away via this very thread!
- 25 eBooks from PragProg!
- 25 eBooks from Manning!
- 10 Swag Packs from AppSignal! (If you live in a country they can ship to)
- 5 twelve month ElixirCasts subscriptions!
All you need to do to win is to post a comment in this thread - anything positive will suffice!
Perhaps you’d like to share a positive experience you’ve had on the forum? Maybe you can recollect the first time you laid eyes on us? (Was it love at first sight? 
) Maybe you lurked for a while and then something or someone made you want to join up to post? Maybe you were stuck on something and posted and were astonished at how quickly you received a response? Perhaps you can recall the first time José or Chris or Robert or Joe or one of the Erlang Core Team members replied to you? Or, maybe, you’ve really appreciated just being part of such a cool community and have enjoyed the companionship and support you’ve received over the years 
Whatever it is, if it’s positive or uplifting we’d love to hear it!
For those who want to comment but don’t want a prize, that’s cool too! (Just ignore the next bit..)
Click here for details on how to enter!
- Post a reply in this thread (any positive comment/experience will suffice).
- You can win only one prize, so once you’ve posted your comment please PM @AstonJ with your most preferred prize at the top of your list, working your way down to your least preferred. Please also include your: Name, email address and country of residence.
- We’ll then allocate these on a first come first serve basis (please note it might take a while to get back to you as we usually wait for everyone to get their details to us before sending them off - we’ll usually ‘like’ your msg/post when we’re about to send your details off).
- You can post more than once but only your first post will count as an entry.7.
and all I’ve tried to do really, is amplify and shine a light on the best side of you and everyone else 
