Discourse ID recommends posts that the user is unable to access

AI-generated summary

roke_julian_lockhart reported a bug where visiting their Discourse ID profile redirects to a 404 page that displays a “Recent topics” menu. This menu links to posts, such as welcome-to-discourse-id, which the user cannot access, resulting in error messages or reloads of the current broken page. rishabh responded that while the 404 redirect is expected behavior for manual URL updates, they have now hidden the recent topics menu on 404 pages to prevent users from clicking on inaccessible content.

If I visit id.discourse.com/u/rokejulianlockhart, [1] I am .assign’d to id.discourse.com/404, whereupon I observe:

Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

Recent topics

That hyperlink hRefs to:

  1. id.discourse.com/c/general/4

  2. id.discourse.com/latest

…which merely .reload the current document.URL. However, it, also, more prominently, hRefs to id.discourse.com/t/welcome-to-discourse-id/5, which returns:

Sorry, we couldn’t load that topic, possibly due to a connection problem. Please try again. If the problem persists, let us know.


  1. meta.discourse.org/t/414489 ↩︎

1 Like

Thanks for sharing!

While the 404 is expected when you manually update the URL to try and go to the top-level profile page, we’ve now hidden the recent topics menu on 404 pages so it doesn’t lead folks to topics that can’t be reached: