Hey there! We’ve built a feature in our website that queries our hosted Discourse forums and displays information about found topics. It was all working nicely last week when we deployed but it stopped over the weekend. It turns out that the topic objects returned from the query have changed structure quite a bit. Expected response object based on testing during development and also matched the latest docs: "topics": [ { "id": 1099, "title": "Build Error: ipykernel 4.8.2 for python 3.6.6 on Windows", "fancy_title": "Build Error: ipykernel 4.8.2 for python 3.6.6 on Windows", "slug": "build-error-ipykernel-4-8-2-for-python-3-6-6-on-windows", "posts_count": 1, "reply_count": 0, "highest_post_number": 1, "image_url": null, "created_at": "2020-06-30T23:36:42.277Z", "last_posted_at": "2020-06-30T23:36:42.357Z", "bumped": true, "bumped_at": "2020-06-30T23:36:42.357Z", "archetype": "regular", "unseen": false, "pinned": false, "unpinned": null, "visible": true, "closed": false, "archived": false, "bookmarked": null, "liked": null, "thumbnails": null, "tags": [ "windows", "builder" ], "category_id": 1, "has_accepted_answer": false } ], Actual/current response: "topics": [ { "id": 1494, "fancy_title": "Build Error: python-magic 0.4.15 for Python 3.8.2 on Mac", "slug": "build-error-python-magic-0-4-15-for-python-3-8-2-on-mac", "posts_count": 1, "archetype": "regular", "pinned": false, "unpinned": null, "visible": true, "closed": false, "archived": false, "bookmarked": null, "liked": null, "tags": [ "mac", "builder" ], "category_id": 1, "has_accepted_answer": false } ], I’m wondering if maybe an update was released that changed responses from the search api? Or more likely, if anyone is aware of an admin setting that might cause this? I had a look through the change log for the last (2.5 released June 24) but don’t see anything that specifically mentions an API change. Thanks in advance for any assistance. Carey

[image] th3coop: I’m wondering if maybe an update was released that changed responses from the search api? Yes, the following topic attributes were recently removed from the payload that is returned for search requests: image_url thumbnails title created_at last_posted_at bumped_at bumped highest_post_number reply_count unseen This change was made for performance reasons. You can still get the title with the fancy_title attribute. We will update the docs to reflect this change.

Thanks a lot @simon, Thanks for the clarification. Thankfully we were already using fancy_title. It was created_at that blew us up. Oh so that must have been this item in the Release notes; Improve performance of category topic list! Is there somewhere I can watch for incoming api changes? Thanks again for the quick assistance. Carey

[image] th3coop: Is there somewhere I can watch for incoming api changes? Sorry, not at the moment, short of the release notes and git changes, but we are certainly thinking about this problem.

Thanks for the heads up, @tgxworld. I’ll admit it was a little disconcerting to have the API suddenly change without warning. Thanks for the quick resolution! Carey

/search/query response body changes for unknown reason

Development

tgxworld (Alan Tan) July 23, 2020, 7:36am 5

@th3coop The removal of those fields have been reverted since those fields are considered public API per Discourse API Docs.

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Topics extracted from API do not appear in discourse forums or vice versa Development rest-api	5	575	August 16, 2022
Discourses API get just the number of search results Development rest-api	8	3365	October 20, 2019
Should search prioritize recent topics over older topics? Feature	53	6553	August 22, 2014
discourse_api search broken Bug	7	1836	September 13, 2015
3.5.0.beta5: Improved admin search, AI forum research, easier site appearance configuration, and simpler plugin development Announcements release-notes	1	763	May 28, 2025

/search/query response body changes for unknown reason

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