The discussion is about adding a “Highlight and share” feature to Discourse forums, similar to the one on Medium and Product Hunt. kam44 proposed this idea and codinghorror initially disagreed, suggesting that sharing the URL to the post is sufficient. However, sam suggested that this feature could be useful for anonymous users who cannot quote.
It appears that the feature has since been implemented by pmusaraj and is now available in the core. It is enabled by default for anonymous users, but can be enabled for all users via the share quote visibility site setting. The feature allows users to share highlighted text on Twitter, Email, or Facebook.
jord8on noticed the feature on the Discourse Meta Community and is interested in implementing it on their own forums. pmusaraj explained that the feature is available in the tests-passed branch and can be enabled via site settings. However, it is currently disabled on mobile devices due to native share functionalities.
Hi everyone,
I was on huffingtonpost and i saw this Highlight and share button :
I think it could be a good idea to add this feature besides the quote feature.
The best will be the same share feature than medium and producthunt, which create an image of the highlighted text :
Producthunt open sourced a tool to do that – GitHub - producthunt/ShareMeow: 😻 text shots service · GitHub
Why? You can simply share the URL to the post. Every Discourse post and topic has OpenGraph / oEmbed tags so it will display appropriately, with an automatic excerpt. Try pasting a link to a Discourse post in Facebook or Twitter to see what I mean. Like so
This would also make quoting more confusing, and elevate the rare use case – “I need to share just this third paragraph of the post” – above the simple use case – “I need to share this post”.
At best plugin material.
Yes you right.
It’s just that i (many) love this on medium & PH. And it’s a good way to better interact the forum cotent on social media.
One area that I think this would not be super confusing is if it was an “anonymous” user feature, anon can not quote anyway and this would make it easier for them to “share” a quote from the forum.
That said I agree, explore this first in a plugin.
Sorry to revive this old post but it seems like this very feature idea that @kam44 proposed is now active on the Discourse Meta Community:
I tried to find some kind of documentation about this new feature but could not find anything. Could someone point me in the right direction to read more about this feature that I just noticed on Meta?
I love this and would love to see this on our forums as well!
That is a new feature by @pmusaraj. An announcement topic should be coming soon.
Yes, thanks Rafael, this is now a new feature in core. By default, it is enabled for anonymous users only, but can be enabled on your site for all users via the share quote visibility site setting:
Note also that it can be enabled for Twitter, Email or Facebook, the latter requires an app id to be added to the facebook app id site setting (their APi requires this).
I see that this feature is now working here on meta, at least on desktop version (couldn’t do it on mobile though)… is it already available on beta version?
Yes it’s available in the tests-passed branch, you should see the site settings in the screenshot from my previous post.
This is disabled on mobile entirely, both iOS and Android have native share functionalities when selecting text.
