New features in 2.5.0.beta3
Improved Bookmarks - now with reminders!
Saving topics/posts for later review has evolved numerous times since the start of Discourse. From stars, to post bookmarks, to user topic timers, we’ve tested out numerous options. We’ve now combined the best of all these into our new bookmark system.
Users can bookmark any post or topic they wish to save for later. Bookmarks can be later accessed via the bookmark tab of the user menu, as well as from the bookmarks page within the user’s activity section. Additionally, users can set reminders to be notified of their bookmarks at a later date. Reminder options automatically adapt to the time and date, so you won’t be offered to “Remind me Later today” when bookmarking at 11pm.
See Improved Bookmarks with Reminders for more details.
Merge Users via the UI
In early 2018 we added support for merging two user accounts into each other. To do so required SSH access to the server, as merge support was added as a rake task.
Users can now be merged by any admin! Visit the user admin page, and select “Transfer & Delete” at the bottom of the page.
Enter the username you want the account to be merged into, and click “Transfer & Delete @username” to start the merge process.
Suspect Users Added to Review Queue
Discourse has long included a “Suspect” user list, which shows users who edited their bio and/or website field on their profile, but did not read anything on the site. Users matching that criteria have been shown to have a higher likelihood than not to be a spammer.
Many Discourse sites were unaware of this list. Further, reviewing the list of users to clean it up was a long process. To improve this, we now add suspect users to the review queue, so they can be reviewed alongside flags, akismet, post approval, and more. We hope this makes keeping your forum clean of spammers a little bit easier.
Automatically Delete Replies
Moderators can now set topics to automatically delete replies after x days, keeping topics clean. We find this most useful on wiki/knowledge base type topics, where discussion is ephemeral, or is integrated into the first post.
Code Block Copying
Here’s a small feature for code-heavy sites. We’ve added native support for quick copying of code blocks. Simply move your mouse over the code block and click the copy button in the top right corner.
New site setting embed_unlisted
Many blogs use Discourse for their comment section. But not every blog post gets comments. When a post is made on a linked blog, Discourse automatically creates a topic for the discussion. This can lead to a lot of “clutter”, with numerous topics that have no replies. Admins can now enable the embed_unlisted site setting, which will cause topic created by the blog to be unlisted until the first reply. Users can access the topic via the “Start Discussion” link at the bottom of the blog post.
Internet Explorer 11 Support ending June 1
We posted about this back in January, but wanted to remind everyone as the date is fast approaching. Please see the topic below for full details.
Even more!
But wait, there’s more! This release has many additional new features, as well as the usual collection of bug fixes, UX improvements, performance enhancements, and more. Far too many to list here. For a full list, be sure to review the Additional Features and Fixes listed below.
