The discussion revolves around removing ‘Welcome’ and ‘Returning User’ post notices after a certain period to reduce confusion and noise in historical threads. JammyDodger highlights issues where outdated notices mislead users, citing examples from the meta forum. While a CSS solution using .post-notice.old { display: none; } exists to hide these notices after 14 days, mattdm suggests making this change default. RGJ supports this, noting it would be a small, effective change leveraging existing functionality. VSCPlays offers a workaround using the Stylus extension. ToddZ raises a concern that the CSS affects all old notices, including staff messages, and seeks a way to preserve them. Isambard questions whether these notices can be disabled entirely, to which Moin replies that trust level settings can limit their visibility. Finally, JammyDodger shares that a theme component has been developed to control the visibility of these notices.
They have caused confusion in a couple of cases where browsing the historic posts has given a misleading impression of what the post notice meant. For example:
I think the older post notices can be hidden from individual sites using a little CSS:
However, I think after a certain window of time these notices become relatively meaningless and serve only as extra noise, which I think applies to all sites. It would be useful if these notices could tidy themselves up after their usefulness had passed.
It seems there is already code to de-emphasize the notices (that’s what the “old” css works on). From the linked post, that happens after 14 days. Maybe remove it completely after that?
Maybe it would be a good idea to just have .post-notice.old: display: none; shipped in the default CSS so people can always override it if they want to. That makes the change very small and it leverages the existing .old functionality.
The CSS in page code doesn’t appear to differentiate new/returning user notices from staff notices, though these are very different types of notices. So, as near as I can tell, suppressing old notices via CSS suppresses all of them.
I would like to hide old new/returning user notices, but absolutely to retain the staff notices. Wondering if anyone can think of a workaround for this (short of asking Discourse to include tag classes in the CSS)?
You can select the trust level to which these are shown with the returning user notice tl and new user notice tl site settings. Selecting TL4 will hide it for most users.
