Weekly Summary

[JammyDodger]

Welcome to our AI-generated Weekly Summary topic!

This is the topic where a weekly summary of meta’s activity is put together by our resident AI, trusty 'ol Bert, and posted here so everyone can get an overview of some of the top discussions over the past 7 days.

It’s set to fire every week at Sunday 21:00

If you’d like to get a ping whenever a new one is posted just set this topic to Watching (and if you change your mind, change it back ).

Much like the daily summary, feedback is certainly most welcome. We’ll be tweaking and refining the idea as we go, so all input is encouraged. We do have a separate topic for that to keep this one just for summaries, but you can find that here - Weekly Summary Feedback

Enjoy!

Small caveat… AI (even GPT-4) does hallucinate, it is unavoidable. Don’t treat everything it says as truth, as there will likely be some lies mixed in. We’ll try to manually correct any if we spot them, but still… keep an eye out.

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

Start Date: 2024-04-14
End Date: 2024-04-21
New posts: 797
New topics: 110

Top users:
JammyDodger (77 likes, 59 posts)
pfaffman (72 likes, 60 posts)
sam (50 likes, 14 posts)
Arkshine (46 likes, 21 posts)
Moin (41 likes, 26 posts)

Interesting Topics

#site feedback

• jordan-vidrine recently installed a “Reader Mode” theme component on Meta that introduces a reader mode when viewing a topic. It’s a work-in-progress but aims to minimize distraction while reading. Read more

feature

• lindsey shared that the Discourse team is exploring a more WYSIWYG editor in the composer, while keeping compatibility with Discourse features. It’s still early in the design and planning process. Read more

• jidanni suggested using AI to make posts more gender inclusive, but the community felt it’s best to write gender-neutral from the start. Using custom AI prompts was recommended instead of injecting instructions into the content itself.

announcements

• sam announced that you can now include large bodies of text in your AI personas. This allows introducing data absent from the model’s training and better grounding personas with concrete information.

theme-component

• The “Scrollable Post Content” theme component was found to be broken on the latest Discourse version. Arkshine is working on an update to fix it.

dev

• merefield was having trouble attaching Glimmer components to certain widgets. david provided a fix that should make it work.

support

• ked shared their experience trying to build a political forum and the difficulties faced in drawing attention and engagement over 3 years, before ultimately shutting it down.

#data & reporting

• MarkDoerr shared a SQL query to count posts by email domain for the past 7 days, excluding automatic groups. Some tweaks were suggested to refine it.

#developers

• With upcoming header changes, theme and plugin developers are advised to prepare by following the migration guide. The ability to use the old header is just temporary during the transition period.

Activity by the @team Group

• JammyDodger helped troubleshoot an issue with the “Scrollable Post Content” theme component.

• david is working on a fix to allow attaching Glimmer components to certain widgets.

• sam swapped the AI model on Meta to Claude 3 sonnet, which is a good choice for summarization.

• Falco clarified that for custom AI tasks, users should use the custom prompt input rather than injecting instructions into the content itself.

• Lilly is open to pull requests to improve and update the “Scrollable Post Content” theme component.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

Start Date: 2024-04-21
End Date: 2024-04-28

• New posts: 676
• New topics: 97
• Top users:
  • Arkshine (110 likes, 58 posts)
  • pfaffman (56 likes, 47 posts)
  • JammyDodger (48 likes, 32 posts)
  • RGJ (41 likes, 10 posts)
  • sam (36 likes, 24 posts)

Interesting Topics

theme-component

• Arkshine provided an update on the Voice Recorder Component, fixing issues and suggesting future features like chat support and pause/resume. denvergeeks proposed adding AI transcription of audio files.

  RGJ updated the Plugin Outlet Locations theme component to fix a deprecation and include the latest plugin outlets, except for wrapper outlets which need more refactoring.

feature

• RGJ expressed frustration with Discourse’s search functionality compared to Google. awesomerobot acknowledged room for improvement and mentioned experimenting with a new Typesense based search plugin.

  sp-jordan-violet proposed adding conditional user fields to improve onboarding by showing fields based on previous responses. pfaffman pointed to the discourse-authentication-validations plugin as a potential solution.

hosting

• Earnie_Baird asked if Discourse is still free to self-host. Arkshine and featheredtoast confirmed it is 100% free and open source under the GPL-2 license if self-hosted.

community

• jenmck asked about allowing users to reply with audio recordings instead of text. Most replies advised against it due to moderation challenges and reduced discoverability compared to text.

  lisandro_iaffar shared lessons learned from running a political Discourse forum, concluding more groundwork is needed to establish common ground before a forum can thrive.

site feedback

• Arkshine provided feedback that the new vivid yellow background in the Meta Branded theme was uncomfortable. awesomerobot adjusted it to a lighter blue.

bug

• oskar1 reported that automatic code highlighting was broken in fullscreen code view. pmusaraj confirmed the bug and Arkshine submitted a fix.

ux

• darkpixlz suggested the loading slider should show actual progress. Falco explained the challenges and current approach of parametrizing the animation.

  sp-jordan-violet provided feedback on improving the webhook admin page layout and information displayed.

dev

• tgxworld introduced a new type: objects for theme settings to replace json_schema with a simpler, more maintainable schema format.

Activity by the @team Group

• JammyDodger provided guidance on splitting a multi-issue post into separate topics, following meta’s one issue per topic format.

• martin shared updates to the experimental admin sidebar, adding “Search site settings” and “Admin user list” links when no results are found in the sidebar filter. Keywords are now translatable.

• Lilly demonstrated that moderators can still convert a PM to a public topic as expected, despite a minor bug after topic deletion/undeletion that requires a page refresh.

• sam discussed improving the Daily Summary, acknowledging hallucinations suck and encouraging editing. JammyDodger noted most people can’t edit them and the HTML format makes it harder.

• awesomerobot shared that a type of spam involving innocuous posts later edited to add spam links has been seen before. Locking the account’s trust level could help prevent the spam edits.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!

[Discourse]

This week on meta.discourse.org…

Key Stats

In the last 7 days on meta.discourse.org, there were:

• 775 new posts
• 101 new topics

The top users this week were:

• sp-jordan-violet with 35 posts and 76 likes
• Moin with 32 posts and 66 likes
• JammyDodger with 34 posts and 59 likes
• awesomerobot with 9 posts and 56 likes
• pmusaraj with 10 posts and 54 likes

Interesting Topics

ux

• awesomerobot rolled out an experimental simplified topic map on meta, dramatically simplifying the layout while keeping useful information available. This generated good discussion and feedback. read more

announcements

• pmusaraj announced that a pre-launch version of Discourse Discover is now ready at https://discover.discourse.org. This generated excitement and some UI/UX feedback and suggestions from the community. read more

• rishabh announced that the “Powered by Discourse” link will now be enabled by default in the latest version of Discourse, linking to the What is Discourse? | Discourse - Civilized Discussion page. read more

community

• Saif asked the community what is stopping them from trying out Discourse AI. BenLeong and sp-jordan-violet provided insightful responses around navigating internal restrictions, estimating costs, and focusing AI on admin tools vs user-generated content. read more

• In a retrospective topic, Bas advised new Discourse admins to spend a few days going over all the settings to gain a solid foundation, as Discourse is very broad. read more

bug

• tumbleweed reported that their Discourse site cannot be opened on Safari iOS 15.8.2. The Discourse team investigated and found a change that needed to be reverted to restore compatibility. read more

• dsims fixed an error in the Twitter onebox code that occurred when some meta tags were missing, restoring basic Twitter oneboxing functionality. read more

feature

• sp-jordan-violet requested an option to suppress notifications when bulk moving topics to new categories, to avoid excessively notifying users. read more

• supermathie proposed adding a standardized authentication log system to Discourse that stores auth events from all enabled auth methods for analysis and troubleshooting. read more

Activity by the @team Group

• awesomerobot rolled out an experimental simplified topic map and actively engaged in the resulting discussion and feedback.

• pmusaraj announced the pre-launch of Discourse Discover and responded to questions and suggestions.

• sam provided insights on Discourse’s security model and weighed in on the Discourse AI discussion, noting plans to enable AI-powered features while self-hosting models.

• david investigated and resolved the Safari iOS 15 compatibility issue.

• tgxworld fixed the Twitter onebox error that dsims initially reported and submitted a PR for.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!