User Status

[andrei (Andrei Prigorshnev)]

No, we don’t have one at the moment. I wonder what would be the use case for such a hook?

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

When a user sets a status, that status could be propagated to other tools / websites in our system.

For example, Fedora Packager Dashboard — mattdm could include when I’m on vacation, and perhaps even more usefully, since Fedora packages often have multiple maintainers, show me the status for co-maintainers, so I know who else is available (or not).

Or, a much more meta but still very interesting-to-me case: we could award the vacation badge when someone sets their status appropriately (on our own Badges system, not the internal Discourse one^[1]).

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1. although actually I’m bridging that too ↩︎

[mcdanlj]

One of my concerns with using this is that the headline use case is a vacation notification. I’d think that plenty of folks would want to share that kind of status with people they trust more, but not post it on the internet broadly.

Would it make sense to optionally limit status to be visible only to members of a configurable group, which could be set to trust_level_n for some value of n, or to staff, or to some other group that makes sense for a particular site?

[Planktro_Neum]

Hi there, ive just enabled this in our community, it works ace hoever is there a way to stop certain words being used on this as i can enter any text I wish. Is there something i have missed… thanks

[JammyDodger]

I’m afraid not currently. It has been suggested to run it through Watched Words, but that hasn’t been built yet. At the moment I use a data-explorer query to give an overview, and couple that with the ability to remove statuses from the user’s Preference/Account page, if that’s any help?

[Planktro_Neum]

Appreciate the reply. Is that way you said easy to implement or a pain. If not i can just keep an eye on what people write.

Again thankyou

[JammyDodger]

As long as you have the data-explorer plugin it’s pretty simple. (you just have to remember to run it)

The simplest query would be:

SELECT *
FROM user_statuses
ORDER BY set_at DESC

Or you could have a swisher one with a direct link to the user’s Preferences/Account page. eg:

SELECT us.user_id,
       us.emoji, 
       us.description,
       'https://meta.discourse.org/u/' || u.username || '/preferences/account' AS preferences_account_url
FROM user_statuses us
JOIN users u ON u.id = us.user_id
ORDER BY set_at DESC

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

We’re a bit lot late to the status-party and have only just enabled this today.

On the settings, can I ask re:

(experimental) Allow users to set custom status message (emoji + description).

This has been “experimental” for five months, are there risks attached to us enabling this in our production environment? When will it move from experimental to stable?

@Canapin

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.

And this would be a great addition

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@Richie

This has been “experimental” for five months, are there risks attached to us enabling this in our production environment? When will it move from experimental to stable?

It’s safe to run in a production environment. We labeled it experimental initially as we were making many changes to it. Things have settled down a fair bit now with the feature, so I think we could probably take that label off at this time.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

Thanks for the assurances Dave @mcwumbly

[Lilly]

i love this feature but only want to enable it for our staff - can we restrict it to groups? i know many of our users would likely want to abuse this feature, or at least use it in a way not intended.

[JammyDodger]

@andrei

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

Just a small update on this, the trial on Meta has concluded, but you can still test this feature out on try.discourse.org.

[darkpixlz]

@JammyDodger

the trial on Meta has concluded,

Just wondering, if this is becoming an official feature, why is it being disabled in Meta?

[JammyDodger]

We don’t have all the features enabled on Meta, only the ones that best serve us. I think the user status is really good for sites where needing to know what other people are up to is more important. On here they were mainly being used as signatures, which isn’t something we want to encourage (other sites may really like that element to them though).

[Lilly]

@JammyDodger

I think the user status is really good for sites where needing to know what other people are up to is more important. On here they were mainly being used as signatures, which isn’t something we want to encourage

For anyone who reads this and wants to restrict it’s use for this reason, I made a little tool to do this awhile back.

GitHub - Lillinator/restrict-user-status: This component restricts the...

[hello-smile6 (9pfs)]

@JammyDodger

On here they were mainly being used as signatures, which isn’t something we want to encourage

On a forum I help moderate, statuses are often used for things like staff jokes (e.g. me “eating production”, and @Firepup650 “breaking production” (just to give an unusual example of how they might be used).