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.
awesomerobotrolled out an experimental simplified topic map on Meta, dramatically simplifying the layout while keeping useful information available. The changes include removing some info, summarizing a single way, and putting some data behind clicks.
tumbleweedreported that after updating Discourse, iOS Safari could no longer successfully open their forum, getting stuck on a “loading” page. david noted it starts working when dev tools are opened and they are investigating.
Ryan_Hyer’s Discourse site broke after moving servers. The issue was narrowed down to Cloudflare caching and minification interfering. Disabling Cloudflare’s “auto minify” feature and purging the cache resolved it.
BryanVrequested a plugin outlet between the post editor and preview. Alteras shared that putting a div in the after-d-editor outlet and some CSS positioning worked as an alternative solution.
#admins
Architect had trouble finding where to generate an API key with the new admin settings layout. Moin pointed to an archive.org link with the old instructions. The new location is in the admin settings dropdown under “API keys”.
supermathie investigated the missing images issue on Meta and found that oneboxing in a PM seems to cause the PM to “take over” the image uploads, making them inaccessible in the public topic. Secure uploads exacerbate this.
salbertelli noticed tag counts were missing on their /tags page. Arkshine debugged and found the pmCount was undefined in the API response, resulting in NaN for totalCount.
forummasterasked self-hosters about their experience to decide between self-hosting on a VPS or using managed hosting. Key considerations are difficulty level, migration ease, and common problems encountered.
fokx wondered if the Discourse Chatbot plugin could use the embeddings generated by the discourse-ai plugin to save costs. merefield explained the reasons for keeping them separate currently.
eisammyshared their positive experience self-hosting Discourse for a month, calling it a good lesson they will take with them in their professional life.
sp-jordan-violet had issues with the sidebar not appearing on a new DigitalOcean install. Moin helped resolve it was due to the navigation menu setting. JammyDodger also explained the difference between the main and admin sidebar settings.
awesomerobotintroduced an experiment simplifying the topic map. Changes include showing top 5 posters, hiding popular links behind a click, and showing most liked replies when clicking the like count.
Master had issues with the Discourse Chatbot plugin responding in English instead of Spanish. merefield and MarcP advised modifying the system prompts to specify the desired language.
RGJ encountered a 500 error when using the gpt-4-turbo model in the Discourse AI Topic Summary plugin. merefield suggested it may be a permissions issue if gpt-3.5-turbo works.
samshared thoughts on the challenges with the mobile design, noting issues like inconsistent button sizes, precious real estate usage, and the need for cohesive topic control normalization.
merefield further clarified that Discourse uses a one-dimensional stream of posts rather than threading. supermathienoted the design ideal is for meandering topics to be branched into new ones by writers.
In a discussion on managing issues with Discourse, sp-jordan-violet shared their unorganized thoughts and asked how others handle issues across GitHub, open-source, product feedback, community, internal, and docs in their communities.
merefieldnoted the Discourse Bars theme component is currently incompatible with the “Powered by Discourse” setting. Arkshinesuggested a small CSS change to resolve it.
pmusarajclarified the status of the Discourse Discover launch and fixed a reported issue with an incorrect site screenshot.
supermathienoted the Discourse design ideal for branching meandering topics and agreed with merefield on the importance of content curation by posters and moderators.
tedpraised the Discourse Discover launch as “so cool” and suggested adding thousands separators to the stats.
tgxworldsaid he’ll try to land the requested reordering feature for the objects type theme setting this week and will update the first post about the identifier property.
HAWKliked the idea of starring/favoriting admin pages to have them show up as buttons for quicker access.
kris.kotlarekfixed the bug causing sidebar section headers to be bold in the admin area.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
pmusarajresponded that URL filtering is a good idea they will look into. The current featured site order is based on noteworthiness + recent activity, but may be revisited to add some randomization.
david clarified that enabling content_security_policy_strict_dynamicstill allows using ‘unsafe eval’ in the content security script src setting. Host sources will be ignored, but ‘unsafe-inline’ is still supported. The old CSP system may be removed to simplify this for admins.
schneelandnoted it’s unclear who the 5 user icons represent, and suggested only showing frequent posters on demand like other stats.
bloomexperimenthighlighted that Discourse could benefit from more inline links to relevant documentation. LWinterbergreplied that tutorials could be linked, but references and how-to guides are better handled by the core UX. Graceful handling of errors like category deletion is most important.
The goal is to bury less-used items to reduce complexity for new users, while still keeping them reachable. sp-jordan-violetacknowledged this will require adjustment for power users but is good for newcomers. A “show me everything” option would be nice to retain.
Master inquired about automating Discourse backups to an FTP server, rather than just S3. merefield noted you can use any S3-compatible provider, while pfaffman mentioned the ability to store backups locally for self-hosted installs.
CvXagreed with several points made about the simplified topic map experiment, including hiding it when there’s not enough content and improving visual distinction. Firepup650suggested a poll on where the topic map should appear when there are few posts. jordan-vidrineshared that he’s really enjoying the new topic map after using it for a couple days.
awesomerobotmade some changes based on feedback, including better handling of German text wrapping and aligning elements. tobiaseigensuggested the topic map should only show at the top to avoid distracting from replying.
Saifannounced the 3.3.0.beta2 release with new features like a redesigned admin sidebar, bookmark menu, and chat from user profiles. pmusarajhighlighted additional plugin improvements and bug fixes in the release.
Moinreported that calculated read times can be very high even when there is only one post in a topic. pmusarajconfirmed it’s a bug and they’ll look into it.
Moin also reported that viewing mentions on a group’s activity page is broken. ondrej was able to reproduce it as well. natsaid they’ll prioritize fixing it.
In a discussion on how ChatGPT and LLMs will impact forums, angusshared an interesting study finding declines in Stack Overflow activity, especially among newer users, while Reddit activity hasn’t declined. simonrelated that he relies more on ChatGPT and docs for learning programming now rather than forums.
fuse tried enabling their site for the Discourse Discover directory but was declined as new user accounts require manual approval. pmusaraj clarified the directory is limited to fully public sites for now.
mattdm provided feedback on the experimental admin sidebar, noting challenges with tag/category organization and the “Community” label. tobiaseigen requested more specifics to make the feedback actionable.
JammyDodgerannounced that Topic Voting has been enabled for the feature category. Users can now vote on feature requests they feel strongly about, with vote allocations based on trust level.
RGJ found a bug where configuring a “read only banner” on a category disables the new topic button from a theme component, even if the user has permission. awesomerobot quickly merged a fix.
New user dudintv encountered a 500 error after upgrading Discourse. With troubleshooting help from david, the issue was resolved by running ./launcher rebuild app from the command line after resizing the disk.
sp-jordan-violetrequested the ability for moderators to silence users directly from chat/channels. This would enable quick moderation capabilities, especially during live events.
Mollyvogasked about implementing a read time/dwell time pop-up modal to remind users to check in with themselves while reading potentially upsetting content. Moin suggested using the “Take a Break” theme component.
Nammerged a fix to improve the spacing and alignment of the “Ask a category expert to respond” text in relation to the “close” button, based on a suggestion from Diego_Santos.
A request for group-specific whispers in addition to staff whispers generated thoughtful discussion on the complexity and potential confusion of adding another whisper level.
vawaver completed translating Discourse into Slovak, going from 40% to 100% for the main client.yml file and plugins. They requested a review to get the translations activated.
The feature category now has topic voting enabled, allowing the Product team to gather user feedback. sp-jordan-violet shared how they use a separate “In Discovery” category to discuss features in active development.
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.
