Hi! I’ve got a question about an alert which popped for some of the users on a Discourse-based forum I’m managing. One user told us: “an alert popped up and told me that I had contributed 29% to the thread and that maybe I should give some time or space or something for others to get a chance to comment.” While we understand how this alert makes sense in general, it’s not useful, and in fact a little problematic for the forum we run. The question is: how can I suppress this warning? A little background: The forum is oriented to trauma survivors (PTSD), and was designed to give trauma survivors (and others dealing with mental health issues) a safe, confidential place to freely discuss what they were going through, and have a place to speak with other survivors for support. The entire premise of the non-profit which is supporting the website is that these people are (more often than not) NOT believed and NOT listened to, and the motto of the organization is “We believe you”, and the founder’s goal is to help other trauma survivors tell their story. So hopefully you can understand why having a pop-up alert tell our users that they’re perhaps talking too much and not allowing others to talk is undesirable and detrimental to the purpose of the forum. The users who brought it to our attention cried when they saw it, and became self-conscious about using the forum - again, not what we need to happen in this population. But I have been unable to find any options which would allow me to influence alerts like these. Can anyone give me information on this alert (I haven’t seen it myself), and any idea on how to change or disable it? Thanks! BTW - Discourse has been excellent for helping this particular community thrive and grow. Ya’ll should be proud of the real benefit the forum is providing these people dealing with the consequences of trauma. Ours isn’t the only trauma-related forum out there, but Discourse’s design has done a lot to facilitate a real community that we feel was lacking in the other trauma forums. Thank you!

You should be able to change the site setting dominating topic minimum percent to eliminate the message. However, I’m not sure if you’d want to set it to 100% or 0%. One of the devs should be able to confirm.

Note that this only appears if there are at least 5 people in the topic as I recall. @jomaxro is correct, modify that site setting to change the threshold for it.

Thank you! It’s a dizzying array of options, and for the life of me I could not find it. Are there other alerts or pop-ups which may cause a similar reaction for the users of our forum? I’m not even sure the full range of options or functionality of the software. I just sort of helped the founder of the non-profit setup the forum in my spare time, and am still learning all of the capabilities Discourse provides. Thanks! @jomaxro @codinghorror - The report I received was that there were three people on the topic, but perhaps there were a few more who said very little? Not sure. But thanks again!

I can think of a few other popups that come up: New user education (educate until posts) Topic necromancy – “This is a really old thread, are you sure you want to post to it?” Topic similarity – “this looks like this other topic” I can’t say whether they’ll actually be a problem for your community, though.

Thanks! I’m going to bring those to the community’s attention, and I’ll let them decide.

We got similar feedback on that same contributing too much warning. We have a personal journal section that other members can comment too as well as the OP. A few journalers have suggested rewording the message as opposed to changing the warning threshold.

Our dominating_topic copy: ### Room for others to join the conversation? This topic is clearly important to you – you've posted more than %{percent}% of the replies here. It could be even better if you got other people to share their points of view, too. Give it a shot and invite them over! Our get_a_room copy: ### Invite others to get involved and reply too Cool, you’ve replied %{count} times to @%{reply_username} in this particular topic! A great discussion involves many voices and perspectives. Can you get anybody else involved? Give it a shot! And don't forget, if you’d like to continue your conversation with this particular user at length outside of public view, [send them a personal message](/u/%{reply_username}).

Oh I really like that change! Fantastic. Let me make it so.

Thanks @Jumanji, copy has now been improved :ok_hand: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/a0df6761943e070402fa9196e8d77a415cabf7dd

How to suppress the warning that a user is contributing too much to a topic

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) May 14, 2019, 11:37pm 8

Good idea, what are your suggestions on the copy changes?

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How to suppress the warning that a user is contributing too much to a topic

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