@tgxworld wrote:

1. Create topic and paste https://meta.discourse.org test into title
2. Topic.last.featured_link returns https://meta.discourse.org test.

@neil Can I confirm that the featured link feature is only activated when the title is a valid link only?

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@meglio wrote:

We already can build queries in the admin panel right from the Data Explorer plugin.

The idea is a simple checkbox addition: “Show in admin panel”, one per query.

If checked, query results are shown as a widget in the Admin Dashboard.

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@schungx wrote:

When using Discourse as a private repository of sensitive/confidential information, we care about password security. My question is: is enforcing unique characters in passwords a good practice or bad?

The Internet seems to have a consensus that:

• Longer passwords are better, although technically speaking it reduces the search space. However, the trade-off seems to be accepted by most due to the fact that

  1. humans are lazy, and will use short passwords if allowed to
  2. the search space reduction is mostly in short passwords which is not significant compared to the entire search space

• Passwords combining different character groups are better, although, again, technically speaking it reduces the search space. But again, humans are lazy and won’t use wierd/uppercase if they don’t have to.

• A min number (usually at least 5 recommended) of unique characters are better. This is less certain. My question concerns this.

I am thinking that forcing unique characters may actually decrease security because:

1. Not many people will use strings of the same characters in passwords… for example, they’ll tend to type 12345 or qwert instead of 00000.

2. Limiting the ability to repeat characters SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the search space. Forgot where I read it, but I read it somewhere that it reduces the search space by more than half.

Any thoughts by security experts on this?

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@tran wrote:

When I installed the chat plugin “babble”,app rebuilded successfully.But when I changed the language to Chinese,the web crashed. So I had to delete the babble hook and rebuild the app but fail.the error info as Follow:

FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: cd /var/www/discourse && su discourse -c 'bundle install --deployment --verbose --without test --without development --retry 3 --jobs 4' failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 282 exit 7>
Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:108:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params {"cd"=>"$home", "hook"=>"bundle_exec", "cmd"=>["su discourse -c 'bundle install --deployment --verbose --without test --without development --retry 3 --jobs 4'", "su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake db:migrate'", "su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake assets:precompile'"]}
c70650de738ba85b221ea09abfd2ee11f5ee8749727025958569982e481032a8
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one

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@meglio wrote:

Digital Ocean is a recommended provider for Discourse self-hosting.

It recently introduced a $15 / mo plan. Compare it to $10 and $20 plans that were there and are still an option:

image.png727x370 23.4 KB

It is interesting that the $15 option has 3GB Memory, which is +1GB compared to the $20 option. Vice-versa, $20/mo has 2 vCPUs.

Not considering the SSD Disk in this comparison, because likely you’re going to add Block Storage for image hosting anyway, which comes at $10/100GB price.

So, we’re currently hosting our 2300 members community at the $20/mo option. All is good and is pretty fast. Pageviews are between 200k and 500k / month, depending on the season.

Now, would I benefit moving to the $15/mo option to get more memory? Will downgrading the number of CPUs from 2 to 1 damange performance considerably? I somewhere read Jeff Atwood’s comments about CPU speed being much more important for Discourse than the number of CPUs.

Any comments? Any recommendations? Discourse team, you should know about it the most. Please give some insight.

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@jcoates wrote:

So… all the staff have roman statue avatars. I like the idea… It sets the staff apart much more than just using flair. Did you use an app for this? Was this just an idea that just popped up or was there any discussion/brainstorming around the decision?

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@meglio wrote:

Are there any preconditions for running a single Discourse instance on your own hardware (colocation), rather than renting a VPS (e.g. Digital Ocean) or a dedicated server (e.g. Softlayer or Hetzner)?

I’ve never had an experience managing my own server hardware, but from what I read, you need direct access to the premises for maintenance tasks like the following:

• SSD / HDD replacement when they fail
• hard reset if not available as a service
• other tasks?

Does it worth the effort, or it is mostly a rigmarole for most communities, except very huge ones? Is there any community size that would make it worth the effort?

For example, a small community like ours with 2300 members and 200k-500k views per month runs smoothly on a $20/mo VPS + $10/100GB/mo Block Storage at Digital Ocean. In 2 years time, I’m likely to get even better hardware at Digital Ocean for the same money. Yet, if we do calculations for 2 years, it is $30 / mo * 24 = as little as $720 expenses. If we go the colocation way, just colocating might cost us ~$80 AUD / month, plus the price of the server hardware to colocate. Plus hardware replacement on failures. Looks like it is not worth the effort and the money invested AT ALL. But I might be mistaken — anyone can give any insight and advice?

This question is addressed to the ones who have experience colocating their own servers. Comments from the Discourse team are very welcome too!

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@amod wrote:

Hi need help to resolve the profile picture not getting updated on sso login. Below are my setting in server side

$userparams = [
            "nonce" => $nonce,
            "external_id" => (String)$user->id,
            "email" => (String)$user->email,
            "username" =>(String) $user->member_name,
            "name" => (String)$user->member_name,
            'avatar_force_update' => 1,
            'avatar_url' => (String)$profile_pic
        ];

I also tried with ‘avatar_force_update’ => true but that also did not work. I checked the logs but could find any issues. I checked the user and it single sign on section, I could see the profile picture link. I copy paste the link and the link is showing the pic. This link is not getting updated on user details

Need Help to resolve the profile pic issue

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@meglio wrote:

image.png919x428 13.4 KB

How to reproduce:

1. Open Data Explorer…
2. Create a new query.
3. Collapse the sidebar.

Results: The button is hidden behind the scrollbar.

Expected: The scrollbar not to overlap the “toggle” button.

Google Chrome latest , Mac OS latest, updated Discourse today.

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@meglio wrote:

Today at Discourse Meta I encountered this limit for the very first time in last 3 years. Seems like the number is incorrect:

Just a minor non-priority fix.

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@Matt_Cleghorn wrote:

Is it possible to set the number of “Latest” posts displayed on desktop/mobile on our homepage (which is using the Categories & Latest view)?

Thanks

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@Ivan_Rapekas wrote:

Hi, we have a forum installed in subfolder, https://www.cuba-platform.com/discuss . The main website has a store located at https://www.cuba-platform.com/store . I would like to share this link in some topic or post of our forum. But Discourse handles this URL as internal, it adds /discuss to the URL: https://www.cuba-platform.com/discuss/store when I click the link in composed message.

The workaround I found - to use a link without www. But I would like to have a permanent solution, because users may publish any external links pointed to our website/old forum and those links will be always dead, and users do not know about the workaround.

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@Frank_Bailey wrote:

Hi folks. I try not to post unless I’m really, truly stuck. I’ve installed Discourse as a Docker container in Ubuntu 16.04 which is a guest VM in VirtualBox with a Windows 10 host. The installation was successful, however I cannot for the life of me manage to configure the SMTP settings in such a way as to allow me to actually receive the activation email.

I’ve tried using a small free SMTP server for development called MailSlurper on the Win10 host, which didn’t work. I tried another similar tool called Papercut, which also didn’t work.

I’ve set up port forwarding from a free DNS service hostname for MYFREEHOST.ddns.net on ports 25 and 2500 (the MailSlurper and Papercut ports), neither of which worked. I can Telnet from the Ubuntu guest OS into the two programs without incident, however sending emails through from Discourse just doesn’t work.

I have also tried using Gmail as the SMTP host using Blaise Pabon’s advice here:

Since my email address is a gmail one it seemed like that might do the trick, but alas not.

I also signed up for a free Mailgun account and tested with that, rebuilding the app after each change to the SMTP settings, and still it does not work.

Can anyone possibly offer any suggestions or advice, or mention the no doubt blindingly obvious thing that I should have checked, please?

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@TomPeace wrote:

Hi, why some translations are updated 4 days ago, while others are updated 21 days ago on Github? I have translated some strings but they are not updated on my community - despite installing the latest beta. How often are the new translations updated?

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@christian.krammer wrote:

We have the problem in our self-hosted forum at https://discuss.gravit.io/ that I and a colleague are always losing the Admin role. Somebody assigns it to me, I assign it to a colleague, and after a while, both of us aren’t Admins anymore.

Anything we can do? Any information I can give you?

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@erlend_sh wrote:

Every week, we’ll be posting an interview with one of our many beloved contributors here on Meta. Find them all in #user-interviews. This week:

Angus McLeod @angus

fullsizeoutput_8cf.jpeg894x1142 312 KB

Tell us a bit about yourself

Name: Angus McLeod.

Location: Currently, Perth, Western Australia.

Until a few months ago I was the Head of Technology at Knotel, a co-working space business in New York. I quit that to focus on building / starting a platform to provide civic and legal services online in any jurisdiction. Part of that involves building plugins for Discourse. It also involves a fair amount of research and thinking. I’m interested in any interesting ideas at the intersection of technology, public services and law. Previously, I studied law in Australia, the US and Singapore and worked for 2 years as a lawyer, before moving to New York and stumbling into a job at a little tech startup (there’s an interesting story there actually involving Craigslist, the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe and transcranial stimulation) .

When I’m not working, I hike (I recently hiked around Yellowstone), I go to the theatre (I used to do some amateur acting), I go dancing and I’ve always read a lot. I’m currently reading Clarice Lispector and some short stories by Balzac.

How did you first find out about Discourse?

A co-worker told me about it in the context of discussing interesting open source projects.

What are you using Discourse for?

Partly as the core of the civc/legal services platform I mentioned, partly as a study of how and why people contribute to open source projects (more on that below) and partly as an example of best practices for my own development as a developer.

How did you get so involved in the Meta community?

By building a number of plugins, then ‘releasing’ them on meta.

What compels you to contribute to Discourse?

There are a few things at work here:

1. I need Discourse for my own project, so contributing to Discourse (core or plugins) is contributing to my own work.

2. Sharing your work with people and getting recognition for it is emotionally satisfying.

3. Being part of project that involves respected developers, and is itself respected, is attractive.

4. It has helped me teach myself how to code.

5. Discourse produces social benefit by making it easy to start your own online community and by improving the quality of discourse on the internet. Contributing to Discourse helps to produce those benefits.

6. It provides the context for showcasing some of my abilities to employers and / or clients. For example, I have used my meta profile and my work on my Discourse plugins as a reference for people I have been providing consulting services to.

Apart from 1, all of these benefits apply whether or not my own project succeeds. So even if that fails (which, if I am being coldly rational about it, it probably will), I would still have gained a huge amount by contributing to Discourse.

Tell us about a non-Discourse community that you’re involved in!

Here in Perth I’ve been going dancing socially - Salsa in particular - which has a community aspect to it. In New York, the co-working space I worked for had a significant community aspect.

While it’s a generalization, I would say that in-person communities are easier to get involved in in the US than they are in Australia. Americans love the idea of ‘community’ and ‘groups’. They like to participate (and to be seen participating). Australians can be a bit more reserved about ‘participating’, particularly Australian men. Part of that is the difference between a big city like New York and a smaller city like Perth, but it’s also partly a reflection of culture.

The culture around ‘community’ is different again in Asia proper. I lived in Singapore for a year while studying at the National University of Singapore. Singaporeans are also ‘joiners’; they love to participate.

What kind of significance does the open source movement have to you?

The relationship between the open source movement and the business side of the tech industry is unique. No other industry has such an integral relationship between communitarian and capitalist values. The open source movement would not exist in the form it does without being subsidized by relatively high wages and significant capital generated by tech businesses, but nor would tech businesses be nearly as successful or socially influential with the foundation of open source that underlies and infuses a lot of commercial technology. This kind of symbiosis doesn’t exist in any other industry. One of the things I hope to do (in life) is to translate the ethos and practice of the open source movement into other industries, in particular law and public services. Communitarianism and capitalism need not be mutually exclusive social forces.

What has been the greatest challenge in learning about Discourse and its community?

For me Discourse is intertwined with learning how to code, so when I think of its challenges I normally think of times when I was stuck trying to figure something out for days hitting my head against the wall (metaphorically speaking).

I’ve never had a serious issue with the community or anyone in the Discourse team. I’ve had moments of minor exasperation, for example when the codebase changes and breaks all my plugins, but this is always minor. I think I have a decent sense for what drives Discourse as a company, and the folks who run it, and it makes sense to me.

Any ideas on how to improve the Meta community?

We encourage respondents to speak candidly on this topic. Even if no sensitive information was discussed, answers will always be presented in a short list.

• Better representation of female and minority voices.

• User-to-user (i.e. non-team) interaction could be a much bigger part of meta.

Any advice to future contributors?

If you’re working on a plugin, release v0.1 when it is 90% ready. It needs to actually work, but you shouldn’t aim for the same level of perfection that core Discourse itself attains, at least in v0.1. Otherwise you will spend disproportionally more time on that 10%, and you may never release it. Moreover, you will find flaws quicker and sometimes you will realize you need to re-think the product logic once other people have played around with it.

Another thing to keep in mind when developing a plugin is how generalizable your code and the plugin functionality is. Generalizability / flexibility can often come as an afterthought, but it should really be at the front of your thinking from the very beginning because it changes the way you code. In particular:

• The more you can abstract logic into isolated functions, the better.

• The more you can use existing functionality from core Discourse, the better.

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@outofthebox wrote:

Hi, if Person A posts a flag-worthy post, and Person B flags it, does Person A know that Person B flagged their post?

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@brianhicks wrote:

Discourse has things like “Your topics is similar to…” and “Welcome to discourse meta!” that appear in the right-hand side of the editor when composing a new topic. I’m not sure what these are called, and have been referring to them as “advice sheets”.

We’re trying some experimental things in my Discourse community, and it’d be really nice to be able to customize these sheets or add more. We don’t want to use post templates, because they will invariably end up in the body of the post once posted. Is there a way to do this? What have other people found success with in their communities?

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@Sudaraka wrote:

I need to know which part of the discourse source code is ignited when we click an external link in a discourse post. I had no luck going through previous threads

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@tarek wrote:

Hello all,

I have been using Docker with the Devicemapper storage driver. After manually editing the launcher script, I finally took the time to convert to Overlay2. Here are the instructions I took to do this. I hope this helps others. I see others have asked the question, but I don’t see any answers. I used this excellent guide to help figure this out.

Step 1: Halt your Discourse application (and other docker apps)

./launcher stop app

Step 2: Commit and save your old Docker containers/images

We first committed each image we care for so that we had the most recent version tagged somewhere with all changes included. This can be done roughly like this:

docker ps -a
# for each container you care for, stop and then commit it
docker commit e198aac7112d export/local_discourse_app

docker save export/local_discourse_app > export_local_discourse_app.tar.gz

Step 3: Change storage driver

I chose Overlay2, but the Discourse-recommended driver is aufs. Adjust as necessary. If something goes wrong, simply set the storage-driver to devicemapper as needed.

Insert the following into /etc/docker/daemon.json

{
  "storage-driver": "overlay2"
}

Step 4: Restart docker

sudo service docker restart

Step 5: Import image into new storage device

docker load < export_local_discourse_app.tar.gz

Step 6: Rebuild Discourse

./launcher rebuild app

I hope this helps! Feel free to suggest any modifications or questions.

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