Review and update topics related to FAQ & Guidelines links

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Yikes, you’re right – appreciate you! I am so used to talking with hosted customers that I forgot to switch context.

Do we have some documentation gaps to fill?

From ask.discourse:

Renaming FAQ to Guidelines in Discourse AI

HAWK:

(I figure Steph is talking about her own site there.)

This prompted me to try to sort out my FAQ vs. Guidelines situation, which has had me a little confused.

In Feb we saw the announcement Renaming FAQ to Guidelines, and it sounds like maybe Discourse hosted instances have this enabled..?:

…but I’m self-hosted (and updated) and still have FAQ in the sidebar and on the About page. The url is /faq with the "Edit this page’ link pointing to /t/guidelines. The FAQ links render the Guidelines page.

Upon adding an external link to FAQ_URL I get a new “Guidelines” link on the About page. FAQ links remain in the sidebar and on the About page, but now point to the external FAQ page.

I believe this is the “old” expected behavior. The announcement says it takes effect “When you opt in to this change” but I don’t find anything in Admin to do this. I gather I’d have to enable the hidden site setting rename_faq_to_guidelines to enable the new change:

site_settings.yml - screenshot from GitHub
site_settings.yml - screenshot from GitHub278×101 1.76 KB

Am I on the right track?

I searched and didn’t find anything specifically covering this, sorry if I missed something.

DiscourseHelper:

Thinking

Searching
Searching for: how to enable the guidelines renaming for the faq page, is there a hidden setting to rename FAQ to guidelines, what does the rename_faq_to_guidelines site setting do, how to migrate from FAQ to Guidelines, why do I still see FAQ if I am self-hosted after recent Discourse updates, is there an admin UI toggle for renaming FAQ to Guidelines or do I need to set a hidden setting manually

Reading
Read: Renaming FAQ to Guidelines

Reading
Read: Using Hidden Site Settings

Reading
Read: Hidden Site Settings Reference Guide

Searching site settings
Found 0 results for ‘rename_faq_to_guidelines’

You are correct—Discourse announced the change to rename the FAQ page to Guidelines (see announcement), but on self-hosted sites, this is not enabled by default. There is no toggle in the standard Discourse admin UI to enable this; instead, you need to enable a hidden site setting called rename_faq_to_guidelines.

This setting is hidden and cannot be adjusted through the usual admin settings panel. As documented in the Meta how-to on hidden site settings, you can modify hidden settings like this from the Rails console:

  1. Access your Rails console:

    cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c

  2. Set the hidden setting:

    SiteSetting.rename_faq_to_guidelines = true

  3. Exit the console:
    Just type exit when you’re done.

After this, Discourse should use “Guidelines” instead of “FAQ” in the sidebar and elsewhere, and /faq will redirect to /guidelines.

If you want to use an external FAQ, you can still use the faq_url setting, which will override the sidebar link even after the rename.

References:

Let me know if you need more details on editing hidden site settings or anything else related!

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