A discussion is taking place about whether privacy policy and ToS should be automatically generated on install in Discourse. Jurica is having trouble finding the auto-generated ToS and Privacy policy pages, and is informed by JammyDodger and tobiaseigen that these pages are now only generated if the company name admin setting is filled in. This change was made to simplify the setup process for small, private communities.
However, Jurica and steko point out that this change can cause issues for communities that want to set up social login with Google or Facebook, which require a link to a privacy policy. Even small, personal websites must have a privacy notice for users due to GDPR regulations. The discussion highlights the need to update documentation and address the issue of broken links to non-existent ToS and Privacy notice pages.
Newbie here. I’m trying to set up my ToS and Privacy policy page.
From what I’ve read here on meta and from what I understand, FAQ, ToS and Privacy policy should be automatically generated on install as topics in the “staff” category and be published on /faq /tos and /privacy, respectively.
The thing is, while /faq is there, /tos and /privacy show the “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” page and no such topics exist. I’m pretty sure I never deleted those and yet everything I’ve read here suggest they should be generated by default.
I think these have been changed recently to depend on whether you’ve filled in the company name admin setting. You can do this in the admin settings, or you can rerun the wizard step /wizard/steps/corporate. Filling that in should then auto-generate the /privacy and /tos pages.
This is a recent change that we made just in the last week. Many sites do not need these legalese pages, especially small, private ones that are not connected to a company or brand. But if you add your company name on the last step in the setup wizard they will be created for you. You can then go and edit them to suit your needs.
You also always have the option of linking to TOS and Privacy notice on your main website if you have one. Look for the privacy policy url and tos url admin settings.
If these topics are not created, there are no links to them anywhere in the UI. I did notice that the default FAQ/Community Guidelines do still link to the TOS and Privacy notice right at the bottom. If they are not created then these links will obviously not work. This is an issue we’ll have to address.
If you remember, can you share links here to the documentation on meta that you came across and found confusing? We will want to update those as well.
Thank you both. So I guess the good news is I’m not an idiot after all.
@tobiaseigen thanks, I’ve seen the option to link to and external privacy policy and ToS, but Discourse is actually on my “main” domain and there’s no other site to link to, so this is not really my use case.
I understand and appreciate the rationale behind not burdening smaller communities run by natural persons with too much legal stuff. However, the problem I now have is that I’d like to set up social login with Google and potentially Facebook, and providing a link to a privacy policy is a prerequisite for social login with these services. I don’t think they require one to identify as a company to be able to use this service, so while this new feature does simplify the life of smaller communities’ administrators in some aspects, it also (unintentionally, I believe) makes it more complicated to set up social login which is a very useful feature.
But OK, I’ll run the wizard and fill out the “company” name, it shouldn’t be big deal now that I know what I need to do - thanks again for that.
@tobiaseigen, to answer your question, there’s no particular document I ran into which states that /tos and /privacy are generated by default, that’s what confused me in the first place. It was more implied in support topics like this one.
I stumbled on the same issue as @Jurica following the link to the ToS page in the default FAQ.
Unfortunately with GDPR even small and personal websites must have a privacy notice for users, even if there’s no corporation to manage the forum.
