Welcome to our AI-generated Daily Summary topic! (1:00 PM 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 (5am 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.
pmusaraj shared an exciting pre-launch version of the new Discourse Discover site. It includes keyword search and integration with the discourse.org website and DiscourseHub mobile apps. Read more
awesomerobot introduced an experimental simplified topic map on Meta, removing some info and summarizing popular links and top replies. The new design aims to reduce clutter while keeping key data available.
jordan-vidrine and others provided feedback on rendering logic and styling of the new topic map. Read more
Architect had trouble finding where to generate an API key in the new admin interface. Moin pointed to an archive link with old screenshots, and keegan updated the guide.
pibodi had issues with HTTP showing an Nginx page after installing Discourse. Debugging revealed it was likely due to a DNS lag pointing to an old unconfigured Nginx server.
Ryan_Hyer’s Discourse site broke after moving servers. The culprit was Cloudflare’s “orange cloud” default settings. Disabling auto-minify resolved it.
GypsyJrasked if all plugins are free when self-hosting Discourse. Jagster and ondrej clarified that while some plugins come pre-installed, others need to be installed separately but are generally free, especially the official ones.
eisammy reported an error in their Discourse instance. Arkshineidentified it as a side-effect of a recently reverted PR and recommended upgrading Discourse to resolve it.
physixfanasked if it’s possible to prevent unlisted topics from being indexed by Google. They realized unlisted topics aren’t meant to be indexed, but Google may have already indexed them before being unlisted. Arkshine suggested using Google Search Console to expedite removal.
The Discourse team is running an experiment on simplifying the topic map. piffyfelt the new topic map should be positioned lower as it currently feels like part of the last post. darkpixlzsuggested making topic view counts more prominent.
pibodicouldn’t access their newly installed Discourse site from iPhone, despite it working on laptop. Arkshinesuggested the server IP may have a bad reputation, common with OVH, causing it to be blocked by Safari on iPhone. Connecting over WiFi resolved the issue, confirming the mobile network was blocking it.
sp-jordan-violetfeels the new experimental admin sidebar navigation requires more clicks and time to navigate compared to before. They are curious what sparked the drastic UI change.
craigconstantinereiterated their request to have topic timer information displayed in topic list views, to help track scheduled content publishing dates. The Add Category Column theme component was suggested as a potential solution if it could sort by topic timers.
David_Ghost expressed pride in having their small forum published on Discourse Discover. j127asked if it’s possible to suggest tags for their forum to be included under.
#admins
Hifihedgehogasked how to specify the maximum length of a custom user field, as they were unable to enter any characters in their test field.
piffy provided feedback that the experimental admin sidebar navigation requires more stretching and taps to access on mobile compared to the previous workflow. They suggested allowing admins to star/favorite pages for quick access.
david clarified that the new strict-dynamicContent-Security-Policy still supports ‘unsafe-inline’ despite the setting description. They plan to remove the old CSP system to simplify things for admins.
bloomexperiment suggested improving the UX when deleting a category that has topics inside. The current behavior forces manual cleanup first. They proposed giving options to automatically move topics to Uncategorized or delete them.
#community-support-program
Several Community Support Experts shared their profile cards, including jericson, HamMan2118 and nolo. The cards highlight their Discourse knowledge and experience.
colin.mckibben requested adding a bulk_create endpoint to the Gamification external event API to avoid rate limiting issues when assigning points to many users at once. Falco said it sounds reasonable and classified it as a feature request.
In a topic on updating Discourse, ogulcan1787 shared some CSS tweaks they made to group categories on the categories page. Changing :before to :after solved an issue they encountered.
sober had issues restoring a backup after a major database upgrade, realizing the problem was incompatible container versions between the backup and restore.
david explained how the new Content Security Policy handles ‘unsafe-inline’ and host sources, with plans to remove the old CSP system.
JammyDodger noted the inability to currently change the start day of the week for the Upcoming Events calendar and classified it as a feature request.
Falco proposed adding a bulk_create endpoint to the Gamification API to handle adding points for many users at once.
tobiaseigen asked for examples of admin pages that are taking more time/clicks to access with the experimental sidebar navigation, to help inform burying less-used items to simplify the UI.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
jordan-vidrineannounced the release of the new Reader Mode theme component, which enables a focused reader experience within Discourse topics. It’s available to install now.
Moin discovered a scaling issue where read time estimates are very high for topics with only one post. Are deleted posts being included in the calculation?
piffy shared how their forum allows users to choose small predefined sprites as a way to express personality, striking a balance between signatures and screen space.
Master is looking for a way to backup Discourse via FTP in addition to S3. Several users suggested using S3-compatible providers or local backups.
robobobo encountered a Ruby version error when trying to rebuild their Discourse app after migrating servers. Updating to the latest version fixed the issue.
schneelandnoticed that complex mermaid diagrams are heavily impacted by not being able to scale them. lindsey will be prioritizing a fix for this to make diagrams more useful.
sp-jordan-violet was having trouble with the Discourse Surveys plugin storing some field values as NULL in the database. isaac provided an SQL query to properly retrieve the response data.
KCAS ran into an error trying to update to 3.3.0.beta2-dev, but agitated.swansonshared that rebuilding via command line resolves it.
sp-jordan-violetrevived a request for slash commands in chat to quickly access features without clicking through menus. This would make chat more efficient to use.
putty inquired about the status of a 2 year old request for group-specific whispers. JammyDodger noted it was deemed very complex and hasn’t gained much traction yet.
fuse expressed gratitude for the Discourse documentation and support after successfully recovering from a failed update by following the manual rebuild instructions. The community is always ready to help!
seefood had some theme components not installing after adding them to the plugins section in app.yml. Arkshineclarified that theme components need to be installed through the admin interface instead.
rcauvin’s Discourse install stopped working after a Docker upgrade removed the AUFS storage driver. pfaffman reassured that rebuilding will restore it without data loss.
Saif announced the 3.2.2 stable release with bug fixes and performance improvements over the previous 3.2.1 version. Remember that all releases, including beta, are production ready!
fuse had some questions about the new Discourse Discover feature after enabling it on their site. pmusaraj clarified the site needs to be public and up-to-date to be included.
ismail said their forum was working yesterday but now gives a vague “not working” error. JammyDodger and pfaffman suggested doing a manual rebuild from the command line to resolve the issue.
#site feedback
JammyDodger announced Topic Voting has been enabled for the feature category on meta, allowing users to vote on features they feel strongly about. Different trust levels get a certain number of votes to use.
sp-jordan-violet reported an issue where chat notifications don’t always show up, especially on desktop when already active in chat. lindsey identified the root cause is non-mention thread replies not generating the header activity indicator and said the team will fix it.
Full30 asked if anyone has info or examples of using the hCaptcha plugin. Arkshine tested it locally and confirmed it works, providing setup steps from the README.
meglio proposed adding search capabilities for encrypted messages in Discourse, similar to how ProtonMail and Wire allow searching client-side decrypted content. They noted it seems theoretically possible but tricky to do securely and efficiently.
dudintv’s forum encountered a 500 error after upgrading. With troubleshooting help from david, it was determined there was insufficient disk space to complete the launcher rebuild app command after upgrading.
sp-jordan-violetshared how Discourse has been solving their fatigue with fragmented enterprise applications, highlighting the benefits of an integrated platform.
#admins
colin.mckibbendocumented a process for adjusting gamification point values in the Discourse Gamification Plugin without retroactively updating old scores.
sp-jordan-violet discussed the idea of group-specific whispers in addition to staff whispers. mcwumbly provided some thoughts on the complexity and potential confusion this could introduce.
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.
