Welcome to our AI-generated Daily Summary topic! (1:00 PM Edition)
This is the topic where a daily summary of meta’s activity is collated by our good friend Bert, and posted here so everyone can get a rundown of some of the top discussions over the past 24 hours.
To account for our global audience, we have three editions (this one, Daily Summary (9pm UTC), and Daily Summary (5am UTC)), which fire at different times of the day so you can get one at a time most convenient to you. All of them cover the last 24 hours (respectively), so the main difference is when they land.
If you’d like to get a ping whenever a new one is posted just set this topic to Watching (and if you change your mind, change it back ).
Feedback is certainly welcome. We’ll be tweaking and refining the idea as we go, so all input is encouraged. We do have a separate topic for that so as to keep this one just for summaries. You can find that here - Daily Summary Feedback
Enjoy!
Small caveat… AI (even GPT-4) does hallucinate, it is unavoidable. Don’t treat everything it says as truth, as there will likely be some lies mixed in. We’ll try to manually correct any if we spot them, but still… keep an eye out.
In the Easy Responsive Footer component, cogdog resolved an update issue by deleting empty link section settings. tgxworld and sfg85 provided guidance on troubleshooting.
sam shared that giving up on markdown is something he would like to avoid with any experiments in the space of a Notion-like editor for Discourse. simon suggested looking at Meta’s Lexical editor as an option to support 2-way markdown to HTML. read more
bhettoasked the community what advice they would give their selves when installing Discourse for the first time. Suggestions included not going overboard with themes/plugins, being disciplined to stick with core functionality at first, and being smart about assigning admin/mod privileges. read more
Rhod shared a post about an AWS S3 user who received a $1000 invoice on an empty bucket due to many calls a commonly named bucket. While not directly related to Discourse, it highlights a potential “Denial of Wallet” issue with S3. read more
AstonJ noticed an unknown ‘cool_kepler’ Docker image when running docker container ls -a. supermathie explained these are randomly named containers, likely left over from an aborted rebuild, and can be safely removed. read more
pmusaraj identified a regression causing a display issue with ‘See who voted’ and submitted a fix.
Saif provided input on the sentiment around using AI in Discourse, striking a balance to enhance writing without completely automating it, in the Discourse AI feedback topic.
-tobiaseigen wondered how many sites silence spammers instead of deleting them and requested input from more sites on their workflow for dealing with spam signups.
HAWK shared that to meet GDPR requirements for removing a name, there is no requirement to automate it as the user can simply request removal of their name.
JammyDodger suggested using the non-official disable email verification plugin alongside a required user custom field to get close to allowing signup with just a phone number for users unfamiliar with email.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
Lilly made some updates to the “Navigation (sidebar) menu display control” theme component. The custom link class name format changed, so some settings need to be updated to match the actual custom link names.
supermathie reported a bug where after using the navigator slider on mobile, the navigator header sticks around visible at the bottom of the screen. Lilly was able to reproduce it on iPhone with Chrome and Safari.
o_o1 is having issues with emails not getting DKIM signed when sent from Discourse, even though it works when sending directly via SMTP. Updating DNS records seems to have resolved it after some propagation time.
James_Dean is seeking a developer for custom theme/plugin work with a $300 budget. HAWK noted it may be challenging to find someone at that price point but a non-CDCK dev might be able to hack something together.
Moin provided feedback on the Daily Summary, noting formatting issues in some reports. sam suspects it may be related to the recent migration to Bedrock Claude 3.
The Events Plugin is working again for Discourse 3.2 after a recent commit, per an update from nathank. The broken tag has been removed.
BogdanR encountered an error during database migration while trying to install the Discourse Chatbot plugin. merefield suspects the pgvector extension may not be up to date.
Crius shared an update on the Category Moderators Enhancer plugin, noting a new version has been deployed for internal testing without any identified issues so far.
Hyan asked about the security of posting code and how Discourse handles potential XSS attacks. They are considering adjusting WAF rules to allow code snippets.
Moin reported that changing the js.browser_update text doesn’t apply on no-JS views. ted explained older browsers can’t support client-side translation so it falls back to the default English message.
zogstrip confirme fix is coming for activity summaries not being sent when other emails are sent. He also shared that displaying the event date on topic titles will be fixed once PR #562 is merged.
ted explained that for js.browser_update text changes not applying on no-JS views, older browsers fall back to the default English message as they can’t support client-side translation.
sp-jordan-violet shared that for their enterprise community, they’d like to see continued investment in administrative Discourse AI tools to help show value to leadership teams, such as sentiment analysis of user subsets over time.
#admins
@L provided a step-by-step guide on setting up a Google Programmable Search Engine and Custom Search API key for use with the Discourse AI plugin’s researcher bots.
angus shared a list of all the actions and filters provided by the WP Discourse plugin, along with example code snippets.
In the “Voice Recorder Component” topic, tobiaseigen and Arkshine discussed ideas for improving the UI/UX of the voice recorder, such as adding recording animations and changing button labels.
hellekin reported an issue with the voice recorder button disappearing in certain themes. Arkshine requested browser console logs to help debug.
Wingtip reported that Amazon oneboxes are broken, with the issue also occurring on meta. Richie confirmed it affects .co.uk links too. sam noted there’s a cat-and-mouse game with Amazon oneboxes due to lack of opengraph/oembed support.
angus proposed a new server-side plugin API that allows registering before/after checks to Guardian can_* methods to modify the outcome, and is seeking feedback on the approach and execution.
tgxworldfixed an issue causing oneboxes to fail when the response size exceeds 2mb. The fix will allow parsing the first 2mb even if the full response is too large.
sam is investigating the broken Amazon onebox, noting the difficulties due to lack of opengraph/oembed support. He also suggested removing a configuration check for the OpenI API key and relying on logs instead.
lindsey started a poll to gather feedback on how often users want to change their online presence settings, as part of investigating separating profile hiding and online presence.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow!
awesomerobot confirmed the DiscoTOC automatic table of contents component has a much slower release schedule for major versions compared to Discourse core, so it’s recommended to stay on beta releases to get new features and security updates sooner.
sp-jordan-violet discovered an issue where adding users to a group by email unexpectedly sent invites to all emails not associated with an existing user. supermathiesuggested improving the copy to make it clearer what will happen.
jidannirequested that clicking “Mark Unread” on a post not navigate the user away from the current page. Other users noted this may be unavoidable to prevent the post from being immediately re-marked as read.
jidannisuggested including the Discourse version number in the “Powered by Discourse” link for end-user visibility. Firepup650 and Heliosurgenoted potential security risks in exposing version info.
Ryan_Hyer encountered issues with the admin dashboard not loading after migrating Discourse to a new server. The problem seems related to Cloudflare’s JavaScript minification.
Samir_Sabriasked how to get the last N posts via the API, construct their URLs, and limit the returned fields. blake provided guidance on using the /posts.json endpoint and extracting post details.
Masterrequested a way to prevent watched word substitutions in specific parts of a post. supermathieshared a workaround of breaking up the word with an HTML comment.
pmusaraj shared an exciting pre-launch version of the new Discourse Discover site. It includes keyword search and integration with the discourse.org website and DiscourseHub mobile apps. Read more
awesomerobot introduced an experimental simplified topic map on Meta, removing some info and summarizing popular links and top replies. The new design aims to reduce clutter while keeping key data available.
jordan-vidrine and others provided feedback on rendering logic and styling of the new topic map. Read more
Architect had trouble finding where to generate an API key in the new admin interface. Moin pointed to an archive link with old screenshots, and keegan updated the guide.
pibodi had issues with HTTP showing an Nginx page after installing Discourse. Debugging revealed it was likely due to a DNS lag pointing to an old unconfigured Nginx server.
Ryan_Hyer’s Discourse site broke after moving servers. The culprit was Cloudflare’s “orange cloud” default settings. Disabling auto-minify resolved it.
GypsyJrasked if all plugins are free when self-hosting Discourse. Jagster and ondrej clarified that while some plugins come pre-installed, others need to be installed separately but are generally free, especially the official ones.
eisammy reported an error in their Discourse instance. Arkshineidentified it as a side-effect of a recently reverted PR and recommended upgrading Discourse to resolve it.
physixfanasked if it’s possible to prevent unlisted topics from being indexed by Google. They realized unlisted topics aren’t meant to be indexed, but Google may have already indexed them before being unlisted. Arkshine suggested using Google Search Console to expedite removal.
The Discourse team is running an experiment on simplifying the topic map. piffyfelt the new topic map should be positioned lower as it currently feels like part of the last post. darkpixlzsuggested making topic view counts more prominent.
pibodicouldn’t access their newly installed Discourse site from iPhone, despite it working on laptop. Arkshinesuggested the server IP may have a bad reputation, common with OVH, causing it to be blocked by Safari on iPhone. Connecting over WiFi resolved the issue, confirming the mobile network was blocking it.
sp-jordan-violetfeels the new experimental admin sidebar navigation requires more clicks and time to navigate compared to before. They are curious what sparked the drastic UI change.
craigconstantinereiterated their request to have topic timer information displayed in topic list views, to help track scheduled content publishing dates. The Add Category Column theme component was suggested as a potential solution if it could sort by topic timers.
David_Ghost expressed pride in having their small forum published on Discourse Discover. j127asked if it’s possible to suggest tags for their forum to be included under.
#admins
Hifihedgehogasked how to specify the maximum length of a custom user field, as they were unable to enter any characters in their test field.
Small caveat… AI (even GPT-4) does hallucinate, it is unavoidable. Don’t treat everything it says as truth, as there will likely be some lies mixed in. We’ll try to manually correct any if we spot them, but still… keep an eye out.
