AI Plugin Causes All Posts to Be Unreadable in Latest Discourse Version

Bug
1

Hi Community,

I’m writing to report a critical bug involving the AI plugin in the latest version of Discourse. This issue has rendered all posts in my community unreadable, and I’ve spent a lot of time isolating the cause. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the problem:

Issue Description

After updating to the latest Discourse version, all posts in my community became unreadable. When attempting to open any topic, users encounter the following error message:

“Sorry, we couldn’t load that topic. This might be due to a connection issue. Please try again. If the problem persists, please let us know.”

Here’s an example URL where the issue occurs:
https://bbs.starorigin.com.cn/t/topic/111

I first suspected a server or connection issue, but after checking, everything appeared to be functioning normally.

I spent an entire evening systematically testing all plugins to identify the source of the problem. Here’s what I did:

  • Uninstalled all plugins: My community returned to normal functionality immediately.
  • Reinstalled all plugins except the AI plugin: The community continued to function without issues.
  • Reinstalled only the AI plugin: The problem resurfaced, and all posts became unreadable again.

Conflict Testing:
To rule out the possibility of a conflict between the AI plugin and other plugins, I:

  • Uninstalled all other plugins and kept only the AI plugin installed.
  • The issue persisted: all posts remained unreadable.

Based on my testing, the AI plugin is the direct cause of this bug. It prevents posts from being loaded correctly, and this behavior is reproducible consistently. The issue occurs regardless of whether other plugins are installed or not.

This bug is severely impacting my community’s functionality, and I’m currently unable to use the AI plugin.

I’m not sure if anyone else has encountered the same issue as me. Can this bug be fixed? Thank you!

4 Likes
2

Do you see any errors in https://bbs.starorigin.com.cn/logs that might helps?

3

Hey @shannon1024 - Are you using embeddings by any chance? If so, I suspect we could have failed to migrate the embedding config to the new way. Which embeddings provider are you using? Try disabling ai_embeddings_enabled until we figure it out.

1 Like
4

Or… that isn’t configured at all. It happened to me, because I didn’t know there is new setting. Logs gave a hint, though.

Just a proposal — when you guys are introdusing new setting that must be configured, please tell about it.

5

Wow, you’re absolutely right! You’ve pinpointed the issue perfectly!!
When I enabled the setting AI embeddings semantic related topics enabled
all my posts stopped working and couldn’t be opened.

Just now, I turned off that setting, and everything went back to normal! Thank you so much for your help!

3 Likes
6

Great. Which provider are you using for generating embeddings?

I’m really sorry this happened. It was never the intent to leave things unconfigured or in a broken state. We do have a migration that automatically copies the configuration, so something must have gone wrong there. If you could please let me know that, I’ll look into it.

2 Likes
7

I’m using OpenAI’s model for generating embeddings. I’d like to share some personal feedback and suggestions based on my experience, which might help improve the system:

  1. Migration Issues with AI Configuration:
    When restoring backups or migrating a Discourse community, the configurations and settings for AI models (e.g., API keys, plugin settings) are not migrated correctly. This has caused several issues, including the one I encountered today. For example, after migrating my community and restoring a backup, the AI model settings, API keys, and plugin configurations were not properly transferred, leading to functionality breakdowns.

  2. Confusing AI Plugin Settings Interface:
    The current settings interface for the AI plugin is quite overwhelming. For instance, even if no embeddings model is configured, certain related settings (like AI embeddings semantic related topics enabled) can still be enabled. This seems counterintuitive and can lead to unexpected issues. Additionally, the plugin has dozens of settings all displayed on a single page, making it difficult to navigate and understand their relationships.

    • The settings interface could be organized into functional sections, such as Google Search Models, Semantic Embeddings Models, Image Generation Models, etc.
    • If a specific AI model (e.g., embeddings) is not configured, related settings should be automatically disabled or hidden to prevent confusion and errors.
1 Like