Welcome to our AI-generated Daily Summary topic! (1:00 PM Edition)
This is the topic where a daily summary of meta’s activity is collated by our good friend Bert, and posted here so everyone can get a rundown of some of the top discussions over the past 24 hours.
To account for our global audience, we have three editions (this one, Daily Summary (9pm UTC), and Daily Summary (5am UTC)), which fire at different times of the day so you can get one at a time most convenient to you. All of them cover the last 24 hours (respectively), so the main difference is when they land.
If you’d like to get a ping whenever a new one is posted just set this topic to Watching (and if you change your mind, change it back ).
Feedback is certainly welcome. We’ll be tweaking and refining the idea as we go, so all input is encouraged. We do have a separate topic for that so as to keep this one just for summaries. You can find that here - Daily Summary Feedback
Enjoy!
Small caveat… AI (even GPT-4) does hallucinate, it is unavoidable. Don’t treat everything it says as truth, as there will likely be some lies mixed in. We’ll try to manually correct any if we spot them, but still… keep an eye out.
Arkshine made a pull request for the Voice Recorder Component with possible future features like chat support and pause/resume. denvergeekssuggested adding AI transcription of audio files.
keegan provided feedback on the experimental “Reader Mode” theme component, suggesting color options, click outside to close, and other UI improvements.
darkpixlzpointed out that the loading slider animation doesn’t reflect actual page load progress, especially on slow connections. Falcoexplained that showing true progress wasn’t the goal, and the current behavior is to stop at 90% based on average load times.
jericsonintroduced a new Contact Form plugin that adds a contact form to topics tagged with contact, sending the submitted data to a configured group or category.
Jim_Starkweatherasked about having the import embed unlisted site setting added to the embedding settings page for better visibility. JammyDodgeragreed this could be a good idea and moved the topic to ux for further discussion.
davysuggested that Discourse should better promote its mobile capabilities like PWA support and the mobile app, as many users are unaware of these features.
RGJ started a discussion on Discourse needing better search functionality. They noted that even with AI enabled, finding specific topics can be difficult compared to using Google search. piffysuggested using the “Most viewed” sort option can help, but agreed there is room for improvement. awesomerobotmentioned experiments with a new Typesense search plugin that may help in the future.
RGJ highlighted issues with Discourse’s built-in search compared to Google in the topic “Discourse needs better search”. samresponded with ideas to improve relevance by considering views, likes and page rank. He also fixed a specific search example by appending “Plugin” to plugin topic titles.
In “A note on political forums”, lisandro_iaffar shared challenges running a political Discourse forum in Argentina, noting high server costs relative to the local economy.
sam had an in-depth discussion on improving Discourse’s search relevance algorithm, considering factors like views, likes, and page rank. He also started applying SEO to official plugin topics.
zogstripreplied to a feature request about replacing text in posts, saying he’ll look into it after his morning coffee.
JammyDodgermoved a support topic into an existing feature request about splitting profile visibility and online presence.
Lillyfixed her broken dev install by removing the calendar plugin.
mcwumblynoted that separating chat presence from profile visibility is a niche request they haven’t heard much demand for yet.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
mikeguoasked how to tell if their Discourse instance is self-hosted or hosted by Discourse. JammyDodger suggested checking the dashboard or PMing @team for confirmation.
dsims found that chat replies are missing excerpt text after restarting their self-hosted Discourse. Making a new reply shows the excerpt but it disappears after closing chat. This may be related to some recent PRs.
Graefollowed up noting they had a great conversation with lindsey and mcwumbly about the challenges in considering different community platforms, and Discourse understands the issues.
jgl is looking to give each user their own private category for personal topics. They proposed automatically creating a group and category for each new user with specific configurations.
jrgong is planning to establish a WordPress product database with custom post types and import to Discourse via the WP Discourse plugin. They want to map the WP custom fields to Discourse custom fields for each topic. angusasked how many products will be in the.
jrgong is looking for paid help to add more custom websites to the affiliate plugin and exclude certain links on a per-category basis. Their budget is $100-500 depending on scope. pfaffman is sending a PM to discuss further.
Don thinks the PM envelope icon for going back to message list should be more prominent. They added an arrow in their community to draw attention to its function.
dsims implemented emoji letter-avatars by extracting the first emoji from a user’s name or bio. It uses a new emoji font and falls back to the first name letter if no emoji is found.
davidannounced improvements to JS build times on low-memory servers, reducing ember build time from ~45 min to ~15 min on a 1GB RAM server. merefieldpraised this as helping self-hosters keep costs down.
tobiaseigenproposed allowing moderators to silence rather than delete users flagged by Akismet. mattdm [suggeste://.discourse.org/t/proposed-allow-moderators-to-silence-not-delete-users-flagged-by-akismet/306322/2) terminology tweaks and an auto-delete if the user doesn’t respond.
ogulcan1787 had an issue with JS code not persisting after page refresh when moving tags. Arkshineprovided a cleaner solution using plugin outlets and CSS.
In the discussion on Discourse as a viable comment platform, simonelaborated on the idea of using Discourse to moderate WordPress comments and allow discussions to branch off into Discourse topics. anguscompared ActivityPub to email as a communication standard.
jordan-vidrine shared an update on the “Reader Mode” theme component, with a video demo of the simplified menu and font options. Arkshine called it “absolutely amazing”.
In the Easy Responsive Footer component, cogdog resolved an update issue by deleting empty link section settings. tgxworld and sfg85 provided guidance on troubleshooting.
sam shared that giving up on markdown is something he would like to avoid with any experiments in the space of a Notion-like editor for Discourse. simon suggested looking at Meta’s Lexical editor as an option to support 2-way markdown to HTML. read more
bhettoasked the community what advice they would give their selves when installing Discourse for the first time. Suggestions included not going overboard with themes/plugins, being disciplined to stick with core functionality at first, and being smart about assigning admin/mod privileges. read more
Rhod shared a post about an AWS S3 user who received a $1000 invoice on an empty bucket due to many calls a commonly named bucket. While not directly related to Discourse, it highlights a potential “Denial of Wallet” issue with S3. read more
AstonJ noticed an unknown ‘cool_kepler’ Docker image when running docker container ls -a. supermathie explained these are randomly named containers, likely left over from an aborted rebuild, and can be safely removed. read more
pmusaraj identified a regression causing a display issue with ‘See who voted’ and submitted a fix.
Saif provided input on the sentiment around using AI in Discourse, striking a balance to enhance writing without completely automating it, in the Discourse AI feedback topic.
-tobiaseigen wondered how many sites silence spammers instead of deleting them and requested input from more sites on their workflow for dealing with spam signups.
HAWK shared that to meet GDPR requirements for removing a name, there is no requirement to automate it as the user can simply request removal of their name.
JammyDodger suggested using the non-official disable email verification plugin alongside a required user custom field to get close to allowing signup with just a phone number for users unfamiliar with email.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
Small caveat… AI (even GPT-4) does hallucinate, it is unavoidable. Don’t treat everything it says as truth, as there will likely be some lies mixed in. We’ll try to manually correct any if we spot them, but still… keep an eye out.
