Hey team! Recently set up a discourse install and noticed one potential area for an easy enhancement.
When you go through Discourse settings, there are a whole bunch of fields for doing things, and none of them have descriptions (or, sometimes, names that you can even figure out). This is a little intimidating.
What I found myself doing was
Explore Discourse settings
Notice google_oauth field to enable login with google
Grumble at lack of instructions, start searching google for howto get an OAuth2 api key or whatever
Grumble some more when that didnt work
Eventually discover meta.discourse topic with perfect instructions (including the need to manually enable a totally unrelated google+ API in a totally different area of google’s settings, WTF)
After that, I just searched meta.discourse every single time I was going to set something up and found really fantastic docs on how to do all of it.
So anyway here’s my suggestion: Add a ? icon/link beside settings fields labels which have respective topics on meta.discourse.org would make initial setup a lot more pleasurable!
I really like this idea.
It might even be more feasible then it appears at first sight: We don’t need a topic for every single setting. Instead, for example, just linking all SSO-related settings to here would already be hugely helpful!
It’s been on my list to do a full review of site settings and their descriptions. Given the number of settings we have that will take a long time.
However, when I have specific, easily actionable feedback like this I can fix it much more quickly. I don’t see adding a ? to site settings - that would require some engineering work - but adding links to descriptions is easy enough.
One possible dev related change we may need is to support hyperlinks in field descriptions. While you perform the review we have to also confirm or build support do <a href='abc'>something awesome</a> as a site setting description.
would make initial setup a lot more pleasurable!