Is it possible to create an alternative site that is read-only, just composed of all topics and posts without any javascript? For people who want to follow the discussions and have javascript disabled on their browsers. Note that this won’t include any account based mechanism.

You shouldn’t need “an alternate site” I believe the crawler view is already “no javascript” as is the view for older unsupported browsers, so you could try changing your user agent try a really old browser or just switch off javascript. See: [image] How public Discourse sites are indexed by search engines like Google Site Management bookmark This reference explains how public Discourse sites work with search engines like Google and how the platform ensures content is properly indexed even as a JavaScript application. person_raising_hand Required user level: All users Search engine indexing of Discourse sites Discourse is built as a JavaScript application, but is specifically designed to ensure search engines can properly crawl and index all content on public sites. How Discourse supports search engine crawlers Wh… [image]How public Discourse sites are indexed by search engines like Google To view the JS disabled view, you can either install a plugin in Chrome/Firefox that disables JS or disable using these instructions .

AFAIK out there isn’t any such solution at large. But it can’t be too hard to develop. It is basically just static not-up-to-date-mirror with proper headers for Google. But what would be the point for that? Quite few don’t use JS and when one is doing that he/she knows that the most of functionalites offered by sites are lost. Sure, that would be blazing fast and easy to cache. But… why? Discourse isn’t painfully slow. It would be a honeypot for useless seo-bots, but even then those wouldn’t leave ”master-Discourse” alone. It wouldn’t help googlebot or does anything helpful as far as I can understand. There is one situation where it could be helpful, though. And it is situation when Discourse is down and server/reverse proxy/load balancer knows how to redirect traffic.

I think OP is looking for totally different solution and — perhaps I’m just another negative person — I don’t believe a second users without JS is the real issue here.

Generating a read-only no-javascript light version from a discourse instance

Product Support

attj September 7, 2022, 9:59am 5

My bad, I was super convinced that it was not going to work by default and haven’t tried disabling javascript. It works exactly as I expected. Thanks a lot for the info!

Topic		Replies	Views
Add a <noscript> to discourse Product Support	2	715	March 29, 2020
Googlebot is getting non-javascript version of the site Development	16	1837	March 9, 2024
Discourse noscript Product Support	3	788	October 23, 2018
How public Discourse sites are indexed by search engines like Google Site Management reference	0	13109	February 6, 2013
Disable or bypass feature detect for Googlebot (while serving JS app to crawlers) Product Support unsupported-install	7	3667	June 14, 2022

Generating a read-only no-javascript light version from a discourse instance

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