Improving Try.discourse.org and a positive note

Hello everyone!

As a lot of you know, we have a website for testing out Discourse called try.discourse.org.

First of all, let me say it’s a really helpful tool to find out how to use different Discourse-related options, such as:

  • Topic Voting
  • DM creation
  • Chatting
  • Topic creation, ETC.

And that’s good. It’s a website I’ve used a few times to re-situate myself with Discourse.

I use it about once per year to make sure I’m still good with Discourse, BUT here’s my issue.

Should a website that’s all about testing and figuring out how a website works allow users to interact with all options?

What I mean by this is… I feel that we should be able to mess around with the administrator dashboard or see moderator-based tools and use them, or TL3/4 tools to utilize them since we want to familiarize ourselves with it.

And if the website resets every day, it would undo all actions, right?

Another issue is that it never does a clean reset.

Sure, my user is always deleted, but every single time I go on there, many accounts are still there.

And what’s even crazier is this:

It says everyone just joined and was just seen online, but that’s a lie. I see topics from this past February and users I’m sure haven’t been online since this morning.

But also, I see users with member or basic user trust levels, or admin, when we can’t get there if we are reset daily.

So, my idea:

Let us, if we have ‘admin’ or ‘mod’ in our username, be that role, or we can select it on signup to be admin, or be mod, or be x trust level. That way, we experience those things without having to make a forum free-trial just to test it out.

In positivity, it’s a good website if you want to learn the basics of topic creation or any other member functions.

Thank you for a great website, and let’s continue discoursing.

What’s your opinion on try.discourse.org?

Yes, try.discourse.org is only for testing as a user.

If someone wants to test it as an admin, they can create an instance for free. See You're invited to try the Discourse Free plan beta!
It’s pretty straightforward :slight_smile:

3 likes

It is a very bad idea to allow anyone to be an admin of a forum, even if it’s just for one day. Admins have access to everything:

  • Any personal information of users, like email addresses.
  • Any site setting, so they could just disable sign up for everyone else.
  • The whole theming interface, so they could enter malicious javascript code.

I wouldn’t want to visit a page where this is possible for everyone!

If you want to test all options of Discourse, you need your own site (dev install, self hosted, free tier of Discourse Hosting, free trial of a higher tier, …)

Yes, there is some default content to interact with. That is more helpful than a blank forum.

4 likes

Right but once again.

What’s the point in making a new fourm just for testing?

Suppose you have a quite a few changes and then you want it reset try essentialy does reset it.

Furthurmore what about the other issues stated above?

And lastly free .discourse.org is very limited some things are not allowed to be changed without upgrading

Ok so regarding these issues we could have those pages like email hidden to regular admins and not discourse staff and what not

My issue exactly is someone should not have to make a new forum just to test merging review and splitting for example

It is also very easy, with adequate hardware, to run Discourse on personal infrastructure for testing even just locally :slightly_smiling_face:

This was also already discussed here so you’ll likely get a whole lot of the same answers. Try.discourse.org as a moderator/admin

4 likes

I see.

But no-everyone always has acsess I.E when im on my Ipad or if i don’t have the time to set one up i already have one exsisting

There is no feature in Discourse to hide stuff from admins. They have access to everything. You would need a very complex plugin which allows access to “some” admin features. But then the result is not testing admin but testing something that allows maybe some features of being admin. Looking at how often https://discourse.theme-creator.io/ breaks because something about setting up themes for admin changes, a plugin that allows even more admin actions will likely require a lot of maintenance. I doubt it’s worth the effort as long as starting a free trial on Discourse Hosting requires only a few clicks

I think you can use a GitHub codespace on your iPad. At least, on my Android tablet, that works fine.

1 like

True but i don’t have much time if im on my ipad i use it when im in quick need to do something.

Furthermore.

Im sure that someway discourse can do it i mean if they have an everyday resetting i feel almost sure they could somehow

In that case I have no other recommendation than a Pro/starter trial if you want to test site admin without self hosting or just using the Free plan if you just want to test topic moderation features. There’s not a lot else we can do to help here.

3 likes

Fair.

Just a thought i had but that does make sense.

I mean my best is to use my forums because i own them i only didn’t want to make sure i undo everything but thanks for help