Today on meta.discourse.org…
Key Stats
Over the last 24 hours, Meta saw 107 posts, 46 topics, and 173 likes. A lively mix of support questions, plugin releases, and a big redesign announcement kept the community busy.
Top users by likes received:
- Mcwumbly — 4 posts, 19 likes
- Manuel — 3 posts, 18 likes
- NateDhaliwal — 7 posts, 14 likes
- Chapoi — 7 posts, 12 likes
- Awesomerobot — 4 posts, 10 likes
- Sam — 4 posts, 10 likes
- David — 2 posts, 9 likes
- Putty — 5 posts, 8 likes
- RGJ — 3 posts, 8 likes
- Andrew_Bond — 2 posts, 8 likes
Interesting Topics
#Site feedback
- Manuel announced a new sidebar for Meta’s topic lists, giving each “space” its own contextual panels for navigation, resources, and leaderboards. This continues the recent category organization work and the homepage redesign. Early reactions were mixed: NateDhaliwal wanted a user preference to hide it, while Manuel shared his own thoughts on what worked and what didn’t.
#Announcements
- The category hashtag improvements discussion continued, with Martin asking whether a user preference for hashtag behavior would help, Awesomerobot recapping the card proposal trade-offs, and Martin opening a follow-up PR to shorten subcategory hashtags. Related debate also continued on making inline subcategory links more concise.
events
- Mcwumbly launched a new fortnightly Discourse community hangout, starting October 22 with a tour of the Meta redesign from Manuel. The thread also doubled as a real-world test of Discourse’s events, chat, and livestream integration.
#Theme
- Awesomerobot released a spoopy Halloween theme that took Meta by storm, with Sam briefly “fixing” the typo before undoing it. RGJ couldn’t resist linking to his own Hidden Whispers theme as a seasonal alternative.
#Feature
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Mcwumbly hinted that the team is tinkering with backup compression, responding to the long-running request to avoid redundant gzipping of local backups.
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A request to let users propose a solution post was bumped with fresh votes, with Satonotdead adding their support for the idea.
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Zogstrip shared a long-awaited fix for the ability to jump to and highlight quoted content, which also relates to this existing quote-context request.
product Support
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The appearance of unwanted AI bot accounts sparked a support thread. Sam explained that the bots can be removed by disabling the AI bot and deleting the user, and later shared a PR to stop the bots from being recreated. This also came up in a new user question about disabling AI, where Awesomerobot walked through the relevant settings.
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NateDhaliwal and Awesomerobot answered a newcomer’s questions about desktop clients, AI toggles, and getting started with Discourse, including a handy admin settings URL to disable AI features.
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For those annoyed by auto-linked email addresses, Chapoi and Bas offered workarounds in How to disable email address auto linkify?, with the backslash escape trick getting the thumbs-up.
#Community Building
- A discussion about AI agents signing up for accounts highlighted a growing pain point for admins, with Nickdb and Ed_S sharing their approaches to blocking or vetting agent registrations, and Scottfsmith noting that smarter agents are starting to get through standard challenges.
#Plugin
- NateDhaliwal announced the long-awaited merge of his See TL Progress plugin, which adds trust-level progress visibility with a new set of settings.
#Theme component
- Putty released an Events Calendar component for Custom Lists, adding calendar views and sidebar calendars on top of the Discourse Custom Topic Lists plugin.
development
- NateDhaliwal is looking for beta testers for an inline reply editing component, which swaps the composer for an in-post
DEditor. The thread notes a known related issue with draft conflicts.
bug
- Andresfromsonar reported that you can’t remove an assignment note once it’s added, because the note is treated like a whisper that cannot be saved as empty.
Activity by the Team Group
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Sam responded to the unwanted bots reports, outlined the simplest deletion steps, and posted a fix PR so disabled AI setups no longer regenerate bot accounts. He also joined the fun in the spoopy theme thread.
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David landed a copy improvement for the editor tooltips, removing “new” and “standard” from the editor switch labels, and pointed developers to a likely VSCode fix for
ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCHin dev environments. -
Manuel announced the Meta sidebar, followed up with a detailed personal review, and will be demoing the redesign at the first community hangout.
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Mcwumbly kicked off the fortnightly community hangout, gave input on the hashtag card direction, and acknowledged the backup compression request is being looked at.
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Chapoi shared feedback on the sidebar, the hashtag card UX, email linkification, the jump-to-quote request, and the fullscreen composer.
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Awesomerobot released the spoopy theme, helped a new admin turn off AI features, and explained the motivation behind hashtag cards.
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Martin pushed a follow-up PR for subcategory hashtag shortening, caught up on recurring event topics, and offered a status update on testing boosts.
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Zogstrip delivered the jump-to-quote fix, which had been requested and bumped multiple times.
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NateDhaliwal answered new-user questions, announced the merged See TL Progress PR, and asked the community to beta test his inline editing component.
Between a spoopy new theme, a sidebar that finally knows its place, and a bot eviction notice or two, yesterday on Meta had everything but the candy.