Weekly Summary

[JammyDodger]

Welcome to our AI-generated Weekly Summary topic!

This is the topic where a weekly summary of meta’s activity is put together by our resident AI, trusty 'ol Bert, and posted here so everyone can get an overview of some of the top discussions over the past 7 days.

It’s set to fire every week at Sunday 21:00

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 ).

Much like the daily summary, feedback is certainly most 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 to keep this one just for summaries, but you can find that here - Weekly 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.

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

Start Date: 2024-03-31
End Date: 2024-04-07
New posts: 826
New topics: 109

Top users:
Moin (68 likes, 33 posts)
merefield (63 likes, 30 posts)
Arkshine (60 likes, 35 posts)
bloomexperiment (58 likes, 16 posts)
simon (38 likes, 17 posts)
Lilly (36 likes, 20 posts)
HAWK (35 likes, 6 posts)
45thj5ej (34 likes, 122 posts)
blake (33 likes, 9 posts)
pfaffman (33 likes, 30 posts)

Interesting Topics

community

• Grae, the director of a medium-sized nonprofit, really wanted to choose Discourse for their online community but found the complexity and design to be barriers. This sparked discussion on how Discourse could provide purpose-specific templates to make setup easier for common use cases. Read more

• eisammy, a new member from Brazil, asked for feedback on their personal Discourse project at segredin.com. Suggestions included updating the logo and using the Always Anonymous Categories plugin. Read more

praise

• Discourse has been nominated for The Webby Awards in the Community category! Voting is open to help Discourse win. Read more and vote

site feedback

• jidanni suggested reactions were recently disabled on meta.discourse.org and was curious about the reasoning. Read more

• The question of whether meta.discourse.org should use “worldwide defaults” to serve as an example was discussed. HAWK and others noted the flexibility of Discourse means no two communities are identical. Read more

• jidanni proposed that the “Powered by Discourse” attribution should be enabled by default for new Discourse installs. This sparked discussion on advertising and user trust. Read more

feature

• bloomexperiment suggested surfacing Groups setup more prominently in the Discourse Setup Wizard to help admins get started. This could include prompting admins on what groups to create and assigning default categories. Read more

• tobiaseigen announced that the “Upgrade” admin page has been renamed to “Update” to differentiate the update process on self-hosted sites from plan upgrades on hosted sites. Read more

• The experimental ‘lazy_loaded_categories’ feature, which improves performance by only loading categories as needed, has been re-enabled on meta.discourse.org after some bug fixes. Read more

support

• Firepup650 provided a solution for ncaming215 on how to disable tag icons displaying next to tag names using a site setting. Read more

• 45thj5ej asked about options for deleting all posts by a user on an entire Discourse site via the API. blake noted this is not possible for normal users, only admins can do a bulk “Delete all posts” action. Read more

• Lilly and Arkshine provided CSS solutions to 45thj5ej’s question on how to hide an SVG login icon for logged in users. Read more

hosting

• The question of whether there are any free, supported options for installing Discourse was discussed. ondrej suggested Communiteq as a low-cost option. Others noted while Discourse itself is free, hosting resources are not, but some free tiers may be available with limitations. Read more

#data-and-reporting

• SaraDev shared some useful Data Explorer queries to analyze topics within each category, focused on metrics related to solving topics and moderator response times. These can help admins understand dynamics of topic resolution. Read more

ux

• lindsey reported that the label for marking topics as unread has been updated from “Defer” to “Enable mark topics as unread” for clarity. Further button label updates are also being made for consistency. Read more

#translations

• Moin noted that strings for the discourse-lazy-videos plugin are not available for translation in Crowdin. gerhard created a PR to add those strings. Read more

Activity by the @team Group

• stella announced Discourse’s nomination for The Webby Awards in the Community category and encouraged voting. Read more and vote

• blake introduced a new bulk select topics dropdown for moderators to choose an action to perform on selected topics. This replaces the previous modal to prevent modals on top of modals. Read more

• mcwumbly thanked Grae for sharing feedback on complexity being a barrier to choosing Discourse. He noted reasonable approaches are being evaluated to make Discourse more approachable without losing flexibility. Read more

• HAWK confirmed reactions were recently disabled on meta.discourse.org but the reasoning was not shared. Read more

• lindsey reported label updates to “mark unread” functionality and is considering enabling the feature by default to give members more reading management tools. Read more

• david suggested ozkn report an issue upstream to highlight.js about Rust syntax highlighting problems, as Discourse uses that library. Read more

• Lilly noted the “Getting Started with Discourse” Part 2 video is currently missing from the blog post. JammyDodger is looking into getting it fixed. Read more

• pmusaraj added the ability to disable passwords altogether when using passkeys to the list of possible future improvements. Read more

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

• New posts: 713
• New topics: 97
• Top users:
  • Moin (88 likes, 44 posts)
  • mattdm (48 likes, 16 posts)
  • pfaffman (47 likes, 38 posts)
  • sam (45 likes, 11 posts)
  • merefield (42 likes, 16 posts)

Interesting Topics

community

• jimkleiber asked whether Discourse instances should be referred to as communities, forums, or something else. mbauman suggested Discourse is a tool for a community to use, while mattdm argued a collection of people without an external unifying focus may not actually be a community.

  piffy noted the word “forum” seems antiquated based on Discourse’s self-branding, and that for younger audiences, forums are a foreign concept compared to Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/Discord.

#site feedback

• mbauman asked what changed in the Meta Terms of Service on April 8, 2024. mattdm pointed out “Discourse” was misspelled in the new version. JammyDodger explained the changes were to fold in requirements of the new Digital Services Act.

feature

• mbauman requested an “author-only topic” feature to allow only the original poster to reply, similar to release newsletters. Suggestions included using CSS to hide the reply button, the Discourse Journal plugin, a theme component to strip UI based on a tag, disabling reply by email, or using the Discourse Restricted Replies plugin.

• sam announced the plan is for “Powered by Discourse” to be on by default for self-hosters, with the ability to disable if desired. denvergeeks felt featuring the Discourse branding is a compelling selling point.

• The complexities of threaded discussions were debated, with sam noting the difficulty of 2-way markdown/HTML bridging while avoiding giving up on markdown in any experiments.

ux

• Moin reported a bug where setting a custom bookmark reminder shows the regular bookmark icon instead of one with a timer until the page is refreshed. A fix has been merged.

Activity by the @team Group

• sam:

  • Shared the plan for “Powered by Discourse” branding to be on by default for self-hosters
  • Discussed challenges with threaded discussions and markdown
  • Temporarily disabled reactions on Meta for a few days

• Lilly:

  • Fixed an issue with the new Terms of Service links
  • Provided CSS to hide the “show more” button on topic lists
  • Questioned the logic of hiding new topic notifications

• JammyDodger:

  • Explained the Meta Terms of Service changes were to incorporate requirements of the new Digital Services Act
  • Noted a fix is coming for missing secure upload images

• martin:

  • Manually fixed missing images collected by Moin and is working on a code fix
  • Merged a fix for the custom bookmark reminder icon issue reported by Moin

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

Start Date: 2024-04-14
End Date: 2024-04-21
New posts: 797
New topics: 110

Top users:
JammyDodger (77 likes, 59 posts)
pfaffman (72 likes, 60 posts)
sam (50 likes, 14 posts)
Arkshine (46 likes, 21 posts)
Moin (41 likes, 26 posts)

Interesting Topics

#site feedback

• jordan-vidrine recently installed a “Reader Mode” theme component on Meta that introduces a reader mode when viewing a topic. It’s a work-in-progress but aims to minimize distraction while reading. Read more

feature

• lindsey shared that the Discourse team is exploring a more WYSIWYG editor in the composer, while keeping compatibility with Discourse features. It’s still early in the design and planning process. Read more

• jidanni suggested using AI to make posts more gender inclusive, but the community felt it’s best to write gender-neutral from the start. Using custom AI prompts was recommended instead of injecting instructions into the content itself.

announcements

• sam announced that you can now include large bodies of text in your AI personas. This allows introducing data absent from the model’s training and better grounding personas with concrete information.

theme-component

• The “Scrollable Post Content” theme component was found to be broken on the latest Discourse version. Arkshine is working on an update to fix it.

dev

• merefield was having trouble attaching Glimmer components to certain widgets. david provided a fix that should make it work.

support

• ked shared their experience trying to build a political forum and the difficulties faced in drawing attention and engagement over 3 years, before ultimately shutting it down.

#data & reporting

• MarkDoerr shared a SQL query to count posts by email domain for the past 7 days, excluding automatic groups. Some tweaks were suggested to refine it.

#developers

• With upcoming header changes, theme and plugin developers are advised to prepare by following the migration guide. The ability to use the old header is just temporary during the transition period.

Activity by the @team Group

• JammyDodger helped troubleshoot an issue with the “Scrollable Post Content” theme component.

• david is working on a fix to allow attaching Glimmer components to certain widgets.

• sam swapped the AI model on Meta to Claude 3 sonnet, which is a good choice for summarization.

• Falco clarified that for custom AI tasks, users should use the custom prompt input rather than injecting instructions into the content itself.

• Lilly is open to pull requests to improve and update the “Scrollable Post Content” theme component.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

Start Date: 2024-04-21
End Date: 2024-04-28

• New posts: 676
• New topics: 97
• Top users:
  • Arkshine (110 likes, 58 posts)
  • pfaffman (56 likes, 47 posts)
  • JammyDodger (48 likes, 32 posts)
  • RGJ (41 likes, 10 posts)
  • sam (36 likes, 24 posts)

Interesting Topics

theme-component

• Arkshine provided an update on the Voice Recorder Component, fixing issues and suggesting future features like chat support and pause/resume. denvergeeks proposed adding AI transcription of audio files.

  RGJ updated the Plugin Outlet Locations theme component to fix a deprecation and include the latest plugin outlets, except for wrapper outlets which need more refactoring.

feature

• RGJ expressed frustration with Discourse’s search functionality compared to Google. awesomerobot acknowledged room for improvement and mentioned experimenting with a new Typesense based search plugin.

  sp-jordan-violet proposed adding conditional user fields to improve onboarding by showing fields based on previous responses. pfaffman pointed to the discourse-authentication-validations plugin as a potential solution.

hosting

• Earnie_Baird asked if Discourse is still free to self-host. Arkshine and featheredtoast confirmed it is 100% free and open source under the GPL-2 license if self-hosted.

community

• jenmck asked about allowing users to reply with audio recordings instead of text. Most replies advised against it due to moderation challenges and reduced discoverability compared to text.

  lisandro_iaffar shared lessons learned from running a political Discourse forum, concluding more groundwork is needed to establish common ground before a forum can thrive.

site feedback

• Arkshine provided feedback that the new vivid yellow background in the Meta Branded theme was uncomfortable. awesomerobot adjusted it to a lighter blue.

bug

• oskar1 reported that automatic code highlighting was broken in fullscreen code view. pmusaraj confirmed the bug and Arkshine submitted a fix.

ux

• darkpixlz suggested the loading slider should show actual progress. Falco explained the challenges and current approach of parametrizing the animation.

  sp-jordan-violet provided feedback on improving the webhook admin page layout and information displayed.

dev

• tgxworld introduced a new type: objects for theme settings to replace json_schema with a simpler, more maintainable schema format.

Activity by the @team Group

• JammyDodger provided guidance on splitting a multi-issue post into separate topics, following meta’s one issue per topic format.

• martin shared updates to the experimental admin sidebar, adding “Search site settings” and “Admin user list” links when no results are found in the sidebar filter. Keywords are now translatable.

• Lilly demonstrated that moderators can still convert a PM to a public topic as expected, despite a minor bug after topic deletion/undeletion that requires a page refresh.

• sam discussed improving the Daily Summary, acknowledging hallucinations suck and encouraging editing. JammyDodger noted most people can’t edit them and the HTML format makes it harder.

• awesomerobot shared that a type of spam involving innocuous posts later edited to add spam links has been seen before. Locking the account’s trust level could help prevent the spam edits.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!