Discourse Update Notifier
This workflow makes a post on a dedicated topic after each update of the forum’s Discourse version.
The long standing members of my forum tend to be fairly adverse to UX changes. They sometimes express frustration with a lack of transparency from the forum management in regards to such changes. They are also very technically oriented, and so have a natural interest in the forum infrastructure.
One source of such changes is updates to the forum’s Discourse version. The manager of a forum using one of the excellent Discourse hosting plans won’t necessarily have insight into these updates, since they are provided as part of the hosting service. Having updates taken care of for us by the wonderful Discourse team is of course extremely valuable, but it does makes it challenging for the forum manager to effectively communicate to the community about changes introduced by updates.
This workflow is intended to provide more transparency to the forum user base regarding updates. The primary goal is to ensure some communication has already been made by the time users notice a change.
Here is the source for the workflow:
discourse-update-notifier.json (18.7 KB)
Installation
- Download the workflow source from the link above.
- Navigate to the “Workflows” page in your forum’s admin interface (
/admin/plugins/discourse-workflows/workflows). - Click the “+New workflow” button.
A new workflow will be created and open. - Click the ⋮ button at the top right hand corner of the workflow canvas.
A menu will open. - Select “Import” from the menu.
The “Open” dialog will open. - Select the
discourse-update-notifier.jsonfile from the dialog. - Click the “Open” button in the dialog.
The workflow content will be added. - Follow the additional instructions provided in the “sticky note” you will now see in the workflow canvas.
Demonstration
You can see an example of the sort of posts the workflow produces here: