Display message for user when creating topic

Product Support

AI-generated summary

In a support discussion titled ‘Display message for user when creating topic,’ hollyw seeks a way to warn users against posting personal or sensitive data when creating new topics — without using intrusive popups. They suggest a non-disruptive message similar to Discourse’s existing preview-side notifications (e.g., ‘Your topic is similar to…’). Stephen proposes using topic templates to guide content, but hollyw notes templates may be too rigid for their broad categories. anon48433008 suggests modifying the existing composer popup system (like the similar-topics alert) to trigger a reminder for new posts — acknowledging it’s outside their skill set but offering it as a starting point.

1

Some of the topics on my team’s Discourse are related to debugging/troubleshooting and have the potential to contain personal data. A couple people have already accidentally created topics containing personal data, and I’m sure it’ll happen again.

Is there a way to display a message when a user is creating a new topic (not a plain old reply post) to help with this? We’d basically say something like, “Make sure this post doesn’t contain any confidential or sensitive data.” We wouldn’t necessarily want it to be a popup when clicking Create Topic because that’d be annoying, but maybe something similar to the Discourse messages that sometimes appear in the preview window on the right side of the page (like the “Your topic is similar to…”)

2

What about using a topic template for the category?

I’ve found those to be effective when steering the content of new topics.

3

I think templates may be a bit rigid for our categories since they are quite broad in terms of subject matter. I can further discuss with our team, though.

4

Perhaps the

composer-popup hidden similar-topics ember-view

“Your topic is similar to…”

trigger could be configured for this, or to make a pop up reminder with a new post,

not my skill set just an idea maybe you can work from it.