We’ve been working on redesigning the /about page in Discourse and we’re finally ready to make it available to try it out. If you’re logged in to Meta, you can see it right here by heading to /about. Here’s a screenshot:
2-columns layout to reduce the amount of white space on wide screens
Expandable/collapsible lists of admins and moderators
Visitors and EU visitors stats to enable site owners to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA). This requires the display_eu_visitor_stats setting to be enabled.
How to enable it
Go to the admin site settings page and add the groups that you want to see the new page to the experimental redesigned about page groups setting. If you want all logged-in users to see the page, add the trust_level_0 group. It’s not possible at the moment to make the new page available to anonymous users.
Configuration
Admins can customize the new /about page via the admin config area for the /about page, which is available at /admin/config/about for all sites.
Ability to customize text on /about with full editor is appreciated! Great improvement…
I think the layout could be improved though. Something seems off to my perfectionist eye Banner doesn’t respect right margin and Contact Us seems a bit unanchored vertically (imagine how it would work with longer site description - few paragraphs).
I am not sure if text template report_inappropriate_content can contain a group tag, like @moderators, it would be great if it could include a call to action.
It would be great if there were an easy way to hide admins (or moderators). Maybe have a hidden-admin group? Or maybe have a group for the admins you want to show! Then it could default to admin and moderator, but they could select another group.
My use case is to keep random users of sites where i am am admin because I installed it, or once helped with some technical issue, from contacting me asking for help that I can’t give.
The computer scientist in me likes to group to use instead of admins. The guy who just wants his username not to be included likes to be able to just hide it.
One quality of life improvement I would like to see is an edit this page link at the top like you get on the FAQ, terms of service and privacy pages. It would link straight to /admin/config/about.
I agree this looks a lot better, especially on mobile where even the recommended width of 800 pixels is causing most of the picture to disappear off the right side of the screen.
That’s a great feature request. We’ll take it under advisement. I’m not sure what the smallest change we can make here is that would make this possible. Maybe just a user preference only shown to users who are Admins or moderators? Or, as you say, a site setting to specify the groups to display on the about page, defaulting to Admins and moderators? There are category moderators to, however, so not sure how this would play out.
To be very honest, this is a page we we’ve been wanting to improve for a long time and I’m glad we were able to show it some love, in part in response to requests from customers who needed to update the stats shown on it for gdpr/digital privacy act purposes. However, it’s not the most visited page on discourse so we don’t need to absolutely gold plate it.
It would seem like the allow users to hide profile setting would let an admin change that in their settings, but I don’t see it on my profile on two sites I just checked where I"m an admin.
Warning! This does not take into account the category moderators which are also listed in the (current) about page. The situation here is more complex: given a number of admins and category moderators, there can be a lot of duplication on the page. See, for example, About - petites singularités (there are way more categories when you’re logged in, with quite some duplication).
Can there be some sort of toggle so that users can see the numbers across different periods of time, instead of predefined timelines (today, year, all time). For example, a dropdown to view the different times for each number (like the old version with the table, but now a dropdown)?
It’s just your instance. Or rather the settings. Category moderators show just fine on our instance… Maybe it’s because the user group with the moderation privileges is publicly visible.
If I may, I’d go the way of an admin settings to list which user groups to show on about there rather than showing some checkbox to opt-out to individual users. I think it’s generally admin’s decision what exactly to show there.
Banner doesn’t respect right margin and Contact Us seems a bit unanchored vertically (imagine how it would work with longer site description - few paragraphs).
