Today on meta.discourse.org…
A look at the last 24 hours of activity on Meta, covering October 19–20, 2026.
Key Stats
In the past 24 hours, the community created 34 new topics and 75 posts, earning 124 likes across that activity.
Most-liked posts of the day:
- Manuel's sidebar launch announcement — 10 likes
- Mcwumbly's community hangout announcement — 8 likes
- David's reply to the editor tooltip report — 7 likes
Top posters by likes received:
| User | Posts | Likes |
|---|---|---|
| Mcwumbly | 4 | 17 |
| Awesomerobot | 4 | 10 |
| Manuel | 1 | 10 |
| David | 2 | 9 |
| NateDhaliwal | 5 | 8 |
| RGJ | 2 | 8 |
| Chapoi | 5 | 7 |
| Putty | 3 | 7 |
| Sam | 4 | 6 |
| Nickdb | 4 | 5 |
Interesting Topics
#Site feedback
-
Manuel unveiled the new Meta sidebar, the latest installment of the meta-redesign-2026 effort, following the earlier category space reorganization and homepage redesign. The sidebar adds five panels to topic lists to give each space “a sense of place” while keeping the wider community in view. NateDhaliwal asked whether it could become a user preference, while Andrew_Bond was enthusiastic:
“Yes! This is monumental! For me this changes discourse for the better.”
events
- Mcwumbly announced a new fortnightly Discourse community hangout, starting October 22 with Manuel giving a behind-the-scenes tour of the recent Meta design updates. Putty can’t make the first session but loved how the events tag now works with integrated chat channels and a livestream Join Zoom button.
#Theme
- Awesomerobot shared the spoopy theme just in time for Halloween. Sam admitted he “fixed” the intentional typo and then undid the fix, Jagster confirmed it works great on mobile, RGJ pointed to the Hidden Whispers theme, and Lilly confessed she had to Google “spoopy.”
product Support
-
New user Opalgeist asked about desktop clients and disabling AI features. NateDhaliwal pointed to unofficial desktop clients, while Awesomerobot explained that free-plan content scanning is mandatory but other AI features can be toggled via a filterable settings URL. That fed directly into the unwanted bots thread, where Sam shared step-by-step removal instructions and a fix so disabled AI settings no longer recreate bots, Petrikas reported bots still returning, and Nickdb asked for more transparency around such changes.
-
GlobalDARE reported a critical login outage on a free hosted site, where Discourse ID is disabled and locked while members see “No login methods are configured.”
-
Chapoi and Bas answered a question about disabling email auto-linkification: disable
enable_markdown_linkifysite-wide, or escape the at sign to keep individual emails out of links.
#Community Building
- In the discussion about AI agents signing up for accounts, Scottfsmith reported that an agent from iLands became the first bot to pass his signup captcha. Ed_S planned to block the
ilands.appdomain, and Nickdb argued communities are better served by building their own agents than inviting in opaque third-party services.
#Announcements
- The category hashtag floating cards discussion continued: Chapoi questioned the added value of the cards, Awesomerobot recapped the motivation — shortening long inline paths like
#customization:theme-component— and Mcwumbly suggested fixing the underlying mention display first.
ux
- RGJ flagged that the editor switcher tooltips still say “new” and “standard”, wording that “does not age well.” David agreed and quickly opened PR #44750 to clean up the copy.
#Feature
-
Lief bumped the long-standing request to let users propose a post as the topic solution, asking whether it ever made it past concept; Satonotdead added a vote, calling it a must-have for community-driven forums.
-
Mcwumbly responded to the backup gzipping request, tagged backups, saying the team is tinkering with related storage improvements and will share more when they know more.
#Plugin
- In Discourse Doc Categories, CheckIn-POS_Support1 asked whether external links could open inside the site to preserve the index sidebar; Saquetim offered options, and Singpolyma noted that simple mode isn’t applied to doc topic lists on mobile.
#Theme component
- Putty released an Events Calendar component for Custom Lists, combining the discourse-events and discourse custom topic lists plugins to add calendar views, sidebar widgets, and per-list configuration for the events tag.
bug
-
One1 posted a detailed bug report — composed with help from ask.discourse — showing that user data archive exports crash with
undefined method 'url'when a Data Explorer query group is bookmarked. -
NateDhaliwal hit ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH errors in his dev environment, and David pointed to a VSCode remote development fix that should resolve the flaky page loads.
Activity by the Team Group
-
Manuel shared the new Meta sidebar design and will walk members through how the pieces fit together at the next community hangout.
-
Mcwumbly launched the fortnightly hangout series, shared that the team is tinkering with backup storage changes, and suggested fixing mention display first before deciding on hashtag cards.
-
Sam helped members remove AI bot accounts, deleted the service accounts created for LLMs, offered to post release notes, and shipped PR #44803 so disabled AI settings no longer recreate bots. He also had a laugh over the spoopy theme typo.
-
David submitted a PR to update the editor tooltip wording after the UX report, and pointed to a VSCode update that should fix ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH in dev environments.
-
Awesomerobot explained the free plan’s mandatory content scanning, acknowledged the bot account deletion problem, recapped the hashtag card reasoning, and answered the spoopy thread with a socially awkward penguin meme.
-
Chapoi questioned the value of hashtag floating cards, suggested the
enable_markdown_linkifysetting for email auto-linking, agreed the fullscreen composer still has an annoying double-create click, and clarified the Full-width component is now “in use.” -
Martin returned from leave and will review the recurring events PR, floated the idea of a user preference for hashtag behavior, and gave a brief Boosts testing update.
From spoopy themes to sidebar panels and bots that pass captchas, it was a wonderfully weird day on Meta — see you at the next community hangout! 