Today on meta.discourse.org…
Key Stats
Over the last 24 hours, 51 new posts were published across 28 new topics, receiving a total of 55 likes.
Top users by activity and likes received:
| User | Posts | Likes |
|---|---|---|
| Falco | 3 | 5 |
| Zogstrip | 2 | 5 |
| Sam | 1 | 5 |
| Satonotdead | 14 | 4 |
| Sono_Hen | 1 | 4 |
| Mcwumbly | 5 | 3 |
| Merefield | 3 | 3 |
| NateDhaliwal | 3 | 3 |
| Dan_Eastwood | 1 | 3 |
| SilentNewt95 | 1 | 3 |
Satonotdead was by far the most prolific poster of the day with 14 posts, while Falco, Zogstrip and Sam all earned 5 likes apiece.
Interesting Topics
#Announcements
-
Voice: Discord-style voice and video rooms, now bundled with Discourse — In the voice announcement topic, Mcwumbly outlined an approach for voice channel access control that leans on existing chat-channel and private-category logic, suggesting the team could reuse the pattern used for chat channels and let categories act as the access-control layer. Falco confirmed that associating a voice channel with a chat channel is on the roadmap and will be followed up in the coming months, after the core audio/video experience is solid. read more | Falco’s roadmap reply
-
Easier account signup using email codes — Sandra.Mccollum reported that the new
enable_local_logins_via_codesignup flow is awkward with password managers like Roboform: instead of filling username and password simultaneously, the flow immediately jumps to an email-code prompt, and the password manager inserts the username rather than the email, generating an error. Satonotdead noted in two related threads that this feature (Ask username after validating e-mail) is now bundled into Discourse, and that email codes effectively make the username field on registration unnecessary. read more
#Community Building
-
How do you handle AI responses in your Community? — The community debated AI post policy at length: Merefield asked about Meta’s own attribution policy, Moin cited the guidelines’ “Don’t Post AI” rule, Dan_Eastwood reported an uptick in sophisticated AI-generated posts from users returning after bans and floated the xkcd-inspired idea of AI-Responders testing suspicious new users in a sandbox, and Nickdb shared his zero-tolerance approach backed by an agent that flags possible AI posts from low-trust users before they go live. read more | Moin’s guideline quote | Dan’s AI-tester suggestion | nickdb’s moderation approach
-
What’s the story behind your community? — Sono_Hen introduced Doushitara Ii Project (“What should I do?”), a new Japanese Discourse community designed as a “living book” where people can bring half-formed problems before they become clear questions. The first milestone isn’t member count, but collecting 10 genuine “I’m stuck” submissions from strangers — with an emphasis on preserving the thinking process, not just the answer. read more
-
40C3 – Call for Participation — Thomas_Rother is trying again to organize a Discourse operators meetup at the 2026 CCC congress (40C3), which moves from the CCH congress center to the larger Hamburg Messe. He shared the official call for participation and hopes a longer lead time will draw more responses than last year’s attempt. read more
#Extras
- Using Discourse MCP to quickly build a theme — Sam shared a fascinating deep-dive of building a complete theme via the Discourse MCP using DeepSeek 4.1 flash, with Qwen 3 Image for assets, chrome-devtools-mcp for visual verification, and a total cost of $3.04 at peak pricing — compared to an estimated $50–100 for a similar GPT-6 Astra run. He shared the full transcript, noted that the brief is critical to the outcome (he ran it on the same brief as the OP), and observed that while the model ran unattended for hours, tested everything, and kept the code tidy, the design still had visual glitches and lacked Astra’s vision fidelity. Mcwumbly asked to see a “how I generally work” example using multiple LLMs from multiple vendors. read more
#Feature
-
About thumbs up and down in ask.discourse — Satonotdead asked whether the thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback system in the #ai-powered ask.discourse is planned as a general feature. Falco clarified that “thumbs up are likes, thumbs down are flags — nothing fancy,” while AdamWargon recalled that Codinghorror deliberately avoided the thumbs-down option to facilitate dialogue rather than technically accurate Q&A. Satonotdead then suggested a future thumbs up/down graph or queue in the admin panel as a moderation and AI-monitoring tool. read more | Falco’s clarification
-
Localize category topic templates — SilentNewt95 filed a content-localization feature request to make category topic templates localizable. Currently the composer prefill always appears in the site’s default language, even in multilingual communities. The proposal calls for adding
topic_templatetoCategoryLocalization, using the member’s interface locale with a fallback to the default template, and notes the same gap applies to per-category form templates — the workaround today is splitting the community into per-language categories. read more | Related localized categories work
#Plugin
-
Discourse Workflows — In the workflows topic, Lou asked how to do a case-insensitive match on topic titles in a workflow condition using
contains. Zogstrip suggested{{ $JSON.topic.title.toLowerCase() }}, which worked. Ethsim2 then dug into the plugin source and concluded that Workflows uses a sandboxed JavaScript expression system evaluated server-side, with n8n-like conventions — citing an explicit n8n reference in a merge-node commit. read more | zogstrip’s fix -
Discourse Dynamic Groups — Satonotdead asked whether anonymous (logged-out) users can be scoped into dynamic groups, wanting to hide certain categories from automated groups while keeping them visible to everyone else. RGJ explained that from both a functional and technical standpoint this is impossible: if a category is accessible to
everyone, Discourse setsread_restrictedtofalseand all access mechanisms are bypassed. Satonotdead acknowledged it would only be a “soft” limitation but argued it could still be a worthwhile experiment to encourage contribution over lurking. read more | RGJ’s technical explanation
Support
-
MinIO installer failing again, this time with a HTTP 410 — Merefield reported that the MinIO environment setup in standard plugin system-test CI is broken again, this time with the client download returning HTTP 410 before any tests run — a recurrence of an earlier CI breakage. Ducks acknowledged upstream builds had disappeared, and Merefield confirmed both
minio/minioandminio/mcare now archived, with the README pointing to AIStor and noting the community edition is distributed as source only. Satonotdead suggested Garage and rustfs as lightweight alternatives. read more | merefield’s findings -
Adding users to groups created on demand for monthly cohorts — Mcwumbly moved this to Community Building and proposed a two-workflow solution: one scheduled workflow to create a
YYYY-MMgroup a few days in advance, and another to add users to the right group. He then split the discussion, keeping this as a Support topic for finding “the way” to do it, and invited the author to start a separate Community Building topic about how cohort groups fit into their community over time. read more | follow-up on workflows -
Jumping from 2026.1 ESR to 2026.7 - What I found — Haydenjames documented three upgrade surprises: the current base image ships PostgreSQL 18 and requires a two-stage rebuild (with the old cluster kept at
/shared/postgres_data_oldand a warning to have 2x your database size free, as detailed in the PostgreSQL 18 update); therich_editorsite setting is gone, replaced by a per-user composer toggle; and Cloudflare’s managed “XSS, HTML Injection – Script Tag” rule can block theme saves with a bare 403 when a theme component contains a<script>in its<head>field — with a custom skip rule provided. read more
ux
- Appearance of a onebox in the edit history — Moin reported that a onebox appears oddly in the edit history view. Zogstrip thanked him for the report and acknowledged “diffing is hard
,” but noted the situation should improve once a WIP PR gets merged. read more
bug
-
Removing Going status still keeps you in event chat — NateDhaliwal reported that clicking “Going” on an event grants access to the event’s chat channel, but retracting your “Going” status doesn’t remove you from the chat — which seems unintentional. read more
-
Tags localization issues — ZAICOM followed up on a tags + content-localization bug report with the root cause: they hadn’t set a primary language for tags, a field that should arguably be compulsory rather than optional. read more
Activity by the Team Group
-
Sam — shared a detailed write-up of his test run using the Discourse MCP to build a complete theme with DeepSeek 4.1 flash, including a full transcript, cost breakdown, and honest observations on where open models still fall short of Astra on visual fidelity and attention to detail.
-
Mcwumbly — moved the monthly cohorts topic to Community Building and proposed a two-workflow automation approach; outlined a category-based access-control approach for the Voice feature and suggested catching up with Awesomerobot and Martin on the broader generic access-control push; and asked for more context on the private email setting feature request.
-
Zogstrip — acknowledged the onebox edit history issue and linked to a diffing improvement PR; helped Lou fix a case-insensitive match in Discourse Workflows with
{{ $JSON.topic.title.toLowerCase() }}. -
Falco — clarified that ask.discourse thumbs up are likes and thumbs down are flags; confirmed that voice/chat channel association is on the roadmap and will be a follow-up in the coming months.
-
Tobiaseigen — opened a feature request for a per-user preference for the private email setting, so each member can decide their own risk profile for what appears in email notifications.
-
Moin — cited the Meta guidelines’ “Don’t Post AI” rule in the discussion about handling AI responses in communities.
From a $3 AI-built theme to MinIO’s quiet retirement, yesterday on Meta proved that even when the tools change and the binaries vanish, the community keeps building — and the fun is watching what the AI does next. 
— 