User Status

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

With this announcement, we’re making publicly available a new feature that enables you to set a custom status message. After setting, that message will be shown next to your avatar on posts, in chat, on your user card etc.:

You can use it to let everyone know that you’re temporarily unavailable, are on a long vacation, or just to share your mood.

We’re also enabling the feature here on Meta, so you can go ahead and try it right now.

You can now have a test of this feature on try.discourse.org

How to use it

To set custom status, go to the user menu and press the Set custom status button (this may look a bit different for you if you haven’t enabled the new user menu yet):

Then choose emoji and description, and, optionally, set an auto removing timer. For example, you can set status “ vacation” until Oct 9:

and everyone on the forum will see it. For example, on your posts:

To clear status, open the status modal and press the delete button:

How to enable it on your forum

Note that at the moment this is an experimental feature. To enable it, look for the enable user status setting:

After enabling it everyone on your forum will be able to set a custom status message.

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

Out of curiousity, has there been any investigation into synching this with outlook or ms teams? How can I access it with the api?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Cool feature.

I think I remember a similar feature, via a plugin, which allowed you to set hours of availability, It’s helpful on forums where you interact with people during their working hours.

But I can’t find it.

Anyways, do you plan to add recurring time spans so we could achieve the same thing?

[merefield (Robert)]

@Canapin

I think I remember a similar feature, via a plugin, which allowed you to set hours of availability, It’s helpful on forums where you interact with people during their working hours.

I wrote a simple one once, that allows you to visualise people’s relative working day: GitHub - paviliondev/discourse-team-timezones: A dashboard is placed at the top of specified category topic lists to show waking hours of specified group, e.g. staff

But there is a more sophisticated team solution, but its somewhat different.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@Tris20

has there been any investigation into synching this with outlook or ms teams?

The idea of integrating it with calendars has come up. We haven’t really done much investigation, but expect there may be some complexity around authentication.

@Canapin

I think I remember a similar feature, via a plugin, which allowed you to set hours of availability

There’s the “do not disturb” feature, which has preferences for a “notification schedule” Do not disturb mode

We agree these features are closely related and may bring them closer together in the future, but they are separate at this time.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@Tris20

How can I access it with the api?

With Reverse engineer the Discourse API?

If outlook or whatever has webhooks you could conceivably make it update statuses in Discourse.

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

@pfaffman

With Reverse engineer the Discourse API ?

That was my initial thought, but I’m not seeing many options:

I can see my username in the response but not the request. To me it looks like status can only be set by the user during an existing session. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to specify via api the username for setting status?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I think you just use a global api key and pass the user you want to change as the user in the header.

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

Is it me or do those icons look misaligned (too low / aligned to bottom of text instead of top/middle)

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

@Tris20

How can I access it with the api?

@Tris20

To me it looks like status can only be set by the user during an existing session. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to specify via api the username for setting status?

You’re right, currently it’s only possible to set the current user’s status, you’re not missing anything.

This feature is very young now, and we’re currently working on some further improvements to it that potentially may (or may not) lead to adding a server method that will let you set status of any user. I think it’s worth waiting a bit until we deliver more improvements to user status.

@RGJ

Is it me or do those icons look misaligned (too low / aligned to bottom of text instead of top/middle)

Yes, this definitely can be improved. I’ll take care of it, thank you for reporting!

[riking (Kane York)]

@andrei

This feature is very young now, and we’re currently working on some further improvements to it that potentially may (or may not) lead to adding a server method that will let you set status of any user. I think it’s worth waiting a bit until we deliver more improvements to user status.

Great use for scoped API keys - either set-status for single user or whole site. status: In a meeting

[kynic]

On mobile the emoji shows on left side why is that?

[not-ethan (Ethan)]

Either intentional or its a bug since its overflows. I don’t think it should be displayed there since it could be mistaken as a flair.

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

@RGJ

Is it me or do those icons look misaligned (too low / aligned to bottom of text instead of top/middle)

Here is the fix:

FIX: alignment of user status emoji on posts

@kynic

On mobile the emoji shows on left side why is that?

Here is the fix for this problem:

FIX: status emoji was shown on the left on mobile

[kynic]

Thank you now it looks good

[robotnjik]

So, if I change the theme, the status is gone and I need to set it up again .

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

@robotnjik, thank you for reporting this! I can reproduce it, looks like switching between any themes removes user status. I’ll fix it.

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

Turned out, status was getting cleared not only when switching a theme, but when editing pretty much any user preference except of status itself.

This fixes it:

FIX: status was clearing after editing user preferences

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

@Tris20

How can I access it with the api?

This PR adds a REST API scope for user status:

FEATURE: User Status API

@Tris20

Is there a way to specify via api the username for setting status?

It’s possible now. Note, that you need to use an API key with the All Users level to do it:

More details about using Discourse REST API is here – Discourse REST API Documentation.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

Is there a webhook which fires when status is set?