New to hosting Discourse, and still getting used to the ins and outs here.
From other open source projects I’m used to releases being accompanied by either a comprehensive release notes with technical changes, altered defaults etc (not the unboxing one, but often linked to by such an article), a CHANGELOG file in the Github repo (as far as I can tell there a only some for individual plugins/APIs?), or in the Github release (none, and tags doesn’t seem to include change notes). Am I just missing where these changes are kept track of and communicated, or how is this intended to be handled?
For instance, we were a little surprised that default composer mode was changed for all our users (LaTeX is a vital part of our community so the default was set to Markdown, and got overwritten when we updated 3.4→3.5) and I’m now trying to understand if we missed a release note somewhere or otherwise how to make sure we are on top of similar changes in the future.
Glad to see you here, @torgeirl! Thanks for stepping up to ask this question. Really appreciate the callout and your feedback about how changes to Discourse are announced here on meta. We don’t always get the messaging perfect. Sorry about that!
You shouldn’t have to check the news here on meta to keep up to date with the most significant changes impacting your site. We also have the “What’s new” feed in the admin interface, and as site admin you should be getting a notification when there has been an improvement we think you need to know about. I really suggest you read those (and click through when there’s a read more link).
The what’s new feed is tied to versions as well so you will only see the ones that affect the version you are on. Our hosting customers don’t need to worry about this but if you are self-hosting you may want to update more regularly so you get the latest functionality and don’t get surprised with lots of changes at once. Totally up to you of course. Personally I update my self-hosted site every day because I’m obsessed but others wait a week or two to make sure any new issues are ironed out before they update. The most egregious bugs tend to be reported and fixed in that timeframe.
I checked and do see that we announced the new rich text editor in July but the what’s new blurb did not explicitly say that that it was rolled out as the default editor for everyone. If you had clicked through to the announcement and read it until the end, you would have seen that it is the new default.
In case you missed it, since that announcement was made, we added a new setting that lets you determine the default editor for your site.
notification when there has been an improvement we think you need to know about. I really suggest you read those (and click through when there’s a read more link).
but others wait a week or two to make sure any new issues are ironed out before they update. The most egregious bugs tend to be reported and fixed in that timeframe.