Welcome to our AI-generated Daily Summary topic! (5:00 AM 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 (1pm 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.
keegan provided helpful feedback on the experimental “Reader Mode” theme component, suggesting color options, click-outside-to-close behavior, and a Safari-like UI.
In the Voice Recorder Component topic, fbpbdmin reported issues with the component not recording in some browsers. Arkshine helped troubleshoot and resolve the content security policy errors.
jericson shared a new Contact Form plugin that adds a contact form to the top of topics tagged with contact, allowing submissions without requiring an account.
martin thanked community members for their work on improving POP3 authentication support and said the Discourse team plans to address it before Google’s deadline.
RGJ provided an update to the Plugin outlet locations theme component, now including wrapper outlets and a setting to show the toggle to administrators only. Arkshine suggested supporting plugin outlets in raw templates, but raw hbs are going away according to david. Read more
Arkshine provided feedback on the new yellowish background for the Meta Branded theme, finding it too vivid. awesomerobot adjusted it to a lighter blue to address text contrast issues on the homepage. Read more
packman raised concerns about potential spammer accounts being created that send on-topic but non-specific replies soon after registering. nat suggested increasing the silence_new_user_sensitivity site setting. awesomerobot noted this is a known spam tactic where the account may return later to edit a spam link into their post. Read more
sp-jordan-violet proposed conditional user fields to improve onboarding by showing different fields based on previous responses. This would allow asking role-specific questions and assigning appropriate user groups.
jtbayly suggested the embed unlisted site setting should be reworded to “force embeds to be unlisted” to clarify it overrides any other unlisted status attempts.
fbpbdmin shared that when blocked words are used in chat, the error clears the whole message with no chance to modify it, unlike in posts. Improving this experience was requested.
sam discussed potential approaches to improve search relevance, like extracting topic keywords and considering views/likes. He also did some quick fixes like renaming some plugin topics.
Lilly had some trouble with a broken dev install but fixed it by removing the calendar plugin.
Abbas_Muhammad is looking for a developer to create a price calculator plugin for a Pakistani used iPhone market forum. Arkshine and pfaffman provided some initial guidance on integration options and potential costs.
Genisis raised several issues they are facing with Discourse. JammyDodger reminded to split the issues into separate topics per the ‘one issue per topic’ format on meta.
mikeguoasked how to determine if their Discourse instance is self-hosted or hosted by Discourse. JammyDodger suggested sending a PM to @team for them to check.
In a discussion on political forums, Fabio_Machado_de_Olishared they use a cheap mini PC to self-host Discourse to avoid prohibitive cloud hosting costs in their region.
The topic of improving Discourse’s native search gained traction with various ideas proposed. thoka suggested correlating user behavior and using AI to steer conversations. TheDarkWizard expressed interest in a Typesense plugin integration.
KhoiUSAreported that the Terms of Service & Privacy Policy agreement notice is missing when forum log-in is forced on login-only communities. ondrej noted the current implementation defeats the purpose on such sites.
Diego_Santosshared a minor layout issue with the close button and text in the Category Experts plugin. Arkshineprovided some temporary CSS to resolve it until a fix is implemented.
wenqinasked about installation instructions for the Follow plugin, which Lilly clarified are the same generic steps for all plugins.
#admins
samannounced a fix for a bug causing the rake ai:embeddings:backfill task to fail in the latest Discourse AI - Embeddings plugin.
As part of the Daily Summary Feedback, JammyDodgernoted some limitations with the new inline edit feature when cleaning up category sections and titles compared to the full edit mode.
#sysadmin
kuazaasked if anyone has recently set up S3 uploads successfully as they are facing permission issues accessing uploaded images. pfaffman requested more details about the specific errors and configuration.
#developers
bdflthankedmentalstring for clarifying that Docker needs to be running, not just downloaded, as part of the Discourse development environment setup instructions.
JammyDodgerguided a user to split multiple issues into separate topics and offered to check if a user’s Discourse instance is hosted by Discourse or self-hosted.
samshared a fix for a bug in the Discourse AI - Embeddings plugin and investigated a 500 error with the Automation plugin.
Lillyclarified that the installation instructions for the Follow plugin are the same as for all plugins.
Falcorequested OpenAI API settings from a user encountering an error updating the embeddings module.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
ondrejnoted having many groups doesn’t impact performance unlike many categories, but agreed PMs may be the way to go, perhaps with pm tags allowed for groups enabled.
They’ve settled on “co-solving” for now. Graefollowed up noting a great conversation with the Discourse team who understand the challenge and are interested in addressing it.
merefieldannounced more goodies added to the Discourse Chatbot plugin, including support for the llama3 model when running the bot locally or in the cloud with an Ollama server.
sampondered whether “Chat” is a better topic title than “Official Discourse Chat Plugin”, even if in the plugin category with official tag. Noted the former gives little context.
isaaccommitted to adding conditional user fields this week, as it’s been on his todo list for a while.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
In the topic “What is stopping you from trying out Discourse AI?”, community members discussed barriers to adopting Discourse AI, including concerns about users spamming with AI-generated content, cost, and privacy with remote AI services. awesomerobotsuggested a Discourse-hosted open source LLM as a potential solution.
dsims implemented emoji letter-avatars as a new plugin, allowing user avatars to be generated from the first emoji found in their name or bio. The plugin requires a new emoji font and adds options to the system avatar template URL.
thoka released the Discourse Mail Daily Summary plugin, a fork of discourse-mlm-summary with added features like sending summaries at a specified time, diagnostic output, and narrowing summaries to certain categories.
pfaffman tried implementing it himself but got lost, so Isaac said he can take a look in the next month or so. read more
mattdm proposed allowing admins to run arbitrary automation scripts via docker images. This would provide more flexibility than the current Discourse Automation, while still being secure. The docker images could be provided by admins and associated with an API key. read more
The discussion continued on whether Discourse should become a viable comment platform. angus noted that the WordPress ActivityPub plugin now supports two-way commenting between WordPress and Discourse.
simon elaborated on his idea to use Discourse to moderate WordPress comments and allow them to branch off into Discourse topics for further discussion, similar to how Coral works. read more
kuaza was getting errors trying to [set up Cloudflare R2 storagehttps://meta.discourse.org/t/cloudflare-r2-navigating-setup-and-handling-configuration-errors/305617). After fixing some configuration issues, CSS and JS assets were still not being uploaded to R2 on rebuild. pfaffman pointed out the after_assets_precompile hook needs to be indented properly in app.yml for the rake tasks to run and upload the assets. read more
juicyfannie’s Discourse became extremely slow and noticed /docker/loverlay2 using a lot of disk space. pfaffman noted the overlay size looks normal and the slowness is more likely a RAM issue. read more
jordan-vidrine shared an update on the “Reader Mode” theme component, with a new service to handle the look and feel, simplified menus and font options, and state tracked across topics.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
JammyDodgerimplemented a change to allow moderators to silence, rather than delete, users flagged by Akismet. This provides a “halfway house” where community interactions are restricted but some functionality remains. Read more
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.
