The discussion revolves around the GitHub Status Indicators theme component, which adds status badges to GitHub oneboxes using shields.io. The component is officially maintained by the Discourse team and is available for installation via the Theme Creator. It is not part of the core Discourse code due to concerns about IP address leakage to shield.io, which is why it’s implemented as a theme component instead. Users can self-host Shields using the Docker image provided by Shields.io, and the component can be customized to point to a self-hosted instance by modifying the URL in the code. The conversation includes suggestions for adding a theme setting to allow users to configure their own Shields server, which is welcomed as a potential improvement. Support, bug, UX, and feature requests can be submitted on Meta with the appropriate tags.
I agree with the call of not including this in core onebox, it does technically leak user IP addresses to shield.io.
I do love how it looks though. I wonder if discourse-github should take care of this long term, problem though is that there is enormous amount of work in making this work just right, so for now … the component is good.
This is still a separate theme component. It depends on the third-party shields.io service, so I don’t think we’d want to move it into the discourse-GitHub plugin as-is.
Implementing a similar feature ourselves from scratch is possible, but quite involved (especially when you consider GitHub’s API rate limits)
I think the discussion above was about not wanting to add this theme component’s functionality to the core Discourse code. The reason for that is because it technically leaks a user’s IP address to shield.io. That is why this is a theme component and not a part of the core code.
It can be used on any site, hosted, or self-hosted:
I’m confused because Shields can be self-hosted. In that case, wouldn’t the IP not be leaked to shield.io since it is instead being directed to a self-hosted installation?
That makes sense. I guess the issue is not wanting to add a shields url to the Discourse site settings. If you wanted to use this theme component with a self-hosted Shields installation, I think you would just need to edit this line to point to your installation instead of to img.shields.io:
