Discourse’s embedding system lets you show topic comments on external sites via an iframe — but until now, the experience was read-only. Visitors had to click through to your Discourse site to reply, like, or interact with the discussion.
We’ve added full app mode for embeds, which loads the complete Discourse application inside the iframe. Your visitors can reply, like, quote, and interact with topics without ever leaving your blog or website.
This is awesome! As nice as it is to be able to edit right inside the original page, from my perspective the fact that math is rendered in the embedded version is an even bigger improvement! I look forward to using it on my own site.
In order to try it out, I did navigate to one of the Demo topics that you linked and noticed a few small issues when responding there:
The Markdown/Rich editor toggle did not appear in the editor toolbar,
After posting, I attempted to edit the post at the site and received a warning that the post was being edited in another window, though I had no other window opened in which to edit it, and
I was unable to delete my reply. Evidently, it was deleted by the community.
We removed that, as well as many, many other UI elements, to simplify the experience on the embed. It should be doable to add that back to your site with a small theme component in the case that you need it.
As with anything new, we are trying to strike a good balance and ended up creating an experience that will make sense for most blogs, but Discourse will always be customizable as you expect it to be.
So if I don’t know what Discourse is, I assume there is currently three replies, and that clicking the reply next to Jay’s name is the generic reply to topic button. The unfortunate reality is that Jay will now get notifications of a reply every time someone makes this mistake.
I wonder if there is:
a) a way to bring the Reply to Topic button into view at all times?
b) a way to make the scroll more obvious, whilst still staying elegant and non invasive
These are good suggestions. More generally, perhaps the UI elements have been watered down a little too much? When I responded to the yesterday Trust Levels blog post, I had to infinite scroll for a while before I could examine my response since the timeline-scroll element is missing.
As other users commented, the infinite scroll is not obvious and digs the reply button out of sight when there are more comments than the defined height.
Sadly, as evidenced in one of your example, this still requires the user to scroll through a potentially eye-watering amount of comments inside of an iframe (which has lots of drawbacks) before getting to the end and being able to originate a first-level comment. Is there a way to add a comment that’s not a reply from the top as well?
