Arpit Jalan wrote:

These days I am browsing Discourse much more, and sometimes I noticed that the HTML content of pages were not loading, I needed to do force refresh to resolve the same. Today I encountered that error again, and I captured the screenshot.

Discourse Screenshot from 2014-01-21 17:45:03.png1366x768 137 KB

As usual I refreshed the page manually, and the error was gone. I know this information may not to be sufficient to trace the error. I'll try to trace steps to reproduce this error.

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German Viscuso wrote:

Maybe this would be a good topic for the howto category. What backup strategy should I use to back up a Discourse instance that has been set up for a production environment as in the official installation guide? Is it enough to backup the database and the Discourse base directory? How about the home directory for the discourse user. I'm running the instance not as root but under a discourse user. I need to create the backup strategy.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Michael Brown wrote:

I has a happy face:

I has two:

I has two, each with their turtle:

My smiley has a friend

I has a happy face: :)

I has two: :) :)

I has two, each with their turtle: :turtle: :) :) :turtle:

My smiley :)
has a friend :)

(looks like a colon on a line^Wblock busts any sideways-smileys earlier on the line^Wblock)

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Shiv Kumar wrote:

Continuing the discussion from Brand new plugin interface:

I followed these instruction, but am not seeing any data in New Relic. Anyone else able to get this to work? Not really sure how to troubleshoot...

Note: I updated the gem version to 3.7.1.188, but that is the only change I made

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Jeff Atwood wrote:

Meta means discussion of the discussion itself instead of the actual topic of the discussion.

Why do we need a meta category?

Meta is where communities come together to decide who they are and what they are about.

Meta is for the folks who enjoy the forum so much that they want to go beyond merely reading and posting, to work toward improving our community together. Meta is where all leadership and governance forms, a place for debate and evaluating direction.

Meta is also community memory, documenting the history of your community and its culture. There's a story behind every evolution in rules or tone, and these shared stories bind communities together. Meta is the home for all the tiny details that make your community unique: its terminology, its acronyms, its slang.

What kinds of meta topics can I post?

• Which topics should we allow and encourage? Which topics should we explicitly discourage?

• What sort of replies are we looking for? What makes a good reply versus one that is out of bounds or off-topic?

• What are our standards for community behavior, beyond what is defined in the FAQ?

• How can we welcome new members of our community and encourage them?

• Are we setting a good example for the kinds of discussions we want in our community?

• What problems and challenges does our community face, and what can we do about it?

• How should we moderate our community, and who should the moderators be? When should we flag posts?

• How do we publicize and grow our community?

• What does does TLA mean? Who was Kilroy and why does everyone drop his name when they make a typo?

• How should (or why did) the rules change?

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Claus Strasburger wrote:

I often have a Discourse instance open as a pinned tab (AKA application tab), to save some precious pixels. My browser (Chrome 31) rewards this with blinking the tab whenever something's new.
The problem: This event fires way too often, even if nothing changes. In particular, it fires if I switch to another tab. So my tab is left blinking constantly.

I found out Chrome does this whenever the page title changes. After some more searching, I found the page title is updated in Discourse every time the focus changes!
(see observes(..."hasFocus"...))

github.com

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/7e984e369af424aa7478047da7e7d663b3b01685/app/assets/javascripts/discourse.js#L46

    var notifyCount = this.get('notifyCount');
    if (notifyCount > 0 && !Discourse.User.currentProp('dynamic_favicon')) {
      title = "(" + notifyCount + ") " + title;
    }
    // chrome bug workaround see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2952384/changing-the-window-title-when-focussing-the-window-doesnt-work-in-chrome
    window.setTimeout(function() {
      document.title = ".";
      document.title = title;
    }, 200);
  }.observes('title', 'hasFocus', 'notifyCount'),

  faviconChanged: function() {
    if(Discourse.User.currentProp('dynamic_favicon')) {
      new Favcount(Discourse.SiteSettings.favicon_url).set(
        this.get('notifyCount')
      );
    }
  }.observes('notifyCount'),

  // The classes of buttons to show on a post
  postButtons: function() {

Two questions:

• Is it really necessary to observe that property?
• If yes, can we add a check to only change the title property if it's different from the last one?

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Kane York wrote:

Continuing the discussion from What is "Meta"?:

I think I will, except I'll use VirtualBox instead of a cloud server. Just to be different than what you suggested .

Log:

• Got ubuntu-13-10-server-amd64.iso
• Running install right now [15:44 PST]
• Refusing that silly Ubuntu Landscape™ proposal
• On the "Software Selection" screen, I mark only PostgreSQL database.
• [15:50 PST] Install is done, I have a user shell.

Installing Docker

• The first thing it asks me to do, install linux-image-extra, does nothing but set the image to manually installed. This means I'll have to manually remove it if by any chance I do several kernel upgrades in the future and want to clean out old crap.
• gpg: "36A1D786925C890F966E92D857A8BA88D21E9 is not a key ID: skipping well that's wonderful, I mean, I went to all the trouble of typing it in.
• Aha, if I add the repository to my sources and update, apt-get gives me the correct key ID: because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY D8576A8BA88D21E9 (which happens to be the ending part of that long hex string). Running the key fetch-and-add with that shorter hex string (D8576A8BA88D21E9) works right away.
• Done installing Docker, it's [16:01 PST].

Getting the Discourse docker image

• As sudo, mkdir /var/docker, adduser kane docker, and install -g docker -m 2775 -d /var/docker.
• Start following the Getting Started section
• Git clone fails - git isn't installed! Heh.
• Hmm, it's getting permission denied - I'll just switch into root instead of relying on groups.
• I guess I'll just put fake info in for the hostname stuff. I do own riking.org, but cba to set it up right now
• [16:12 PST] Starting ./launcher bootstrap app
• [16:22 PST] Bootstrap done, ./launcher start app succeeds, a little port forwarding setting in VirtualBox, and:
  
  Pasted image745x250 32.6 KB

Success!

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Ray wrote:

Hey Discourse Team,

I have a slight concern. Right now, I have these 2 forums I've setup http://idxclub.co/ and http://gt4stinger.co. Each forum singularly focuses on a model of an automotive make, in this case Nissan and Kia. Maybe this is me looking far ahead, but at some point, I'd like to include other models of cars (Kia -- Soul, Optima, etc. // Nissan -- 350z, 370z, etc.) for every make (Kia, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, etc.) but I'm concerned that this near flat organization of category may 'confuse' users. This is expected, we know, but how does the Discourse team combat many categories with many more sub-categories? Will Discourse forums resemble more like Stack Overflow at some point... ?

Since it seems that majority of Discourse users thus far are programmers, we can presume that we're adept and understanding leading/bleeding edge tech and we can visually figure things out relatively quickly. Though, my concern lays with non-technical automotive enthusiast forum users or any non-technical user in this case. We understand that there's undoubtedly a learning curve using Discourse but there will be folks who are will be hardened by folder/directory forum structure and heavy deviation may turn-off some/many non-technical people. What do you guys think?

I'd love to hear your thoughts Discourse team. Thank you for a wonderful product/service!

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Philip Bradley wrote:

I set up discourse according to these instructions on a digital ocean droplet with 2G of ram. It is a multi-site install, with two forums, hardly used, actually (maybe 5 visitors per day?).

After about a week, the server dies and the site goes down. The digital ocean control panel says it is running, but the URLs time out and also I cannot ssh into the server.

When I reboot, everything is back to normal, working.

I am not a sys guy at all. This is very likely an ubuntu issue and not digital ocean. How can I begin to diagnose this? Are there logs that will tell me why the machine dies? Should I just set up a crontab that reboots nightly? I hate doing that.

Point me in the right direction, anyone, I'll be very grateful.

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Sam Saffron wrote:

Prior to launch @neil spent a fair amount of time working on an import/export system for Discourse. It has significant advantages over a standard db backup.

• It allows you to import a backup while the site is running
• It has robust rollback in case anything goes wrong
• It uses a single bundle which also contains uploads

Unfortunately we have not promoted this feature well enough and most Discourse site owners are not aware of its existence.

As we near version 1.0 I feel we need to refocus and "finish off" this feature. Here is a basic list of things that should be done prior to 1.0.

• @codinghorror we need to decide on terminology, what are things called? Backup vs Export, Restore vs Import. We need clear terminology describing this feature.

• We need an admin UI capable of:

  • Exporting / Backing up a site
  • Viewing available local backups
  • Download of available backups (to be expanded)
  • Removal of backup sets
  • Restore of external (uploaded) backups and local backups
  • Displaying progress and logs of the backup / restore operations

• We need the backend to support restore from "earlier" backup sets, at the moment the site being restored must be the same version as the site that was backed up. This heavily limits the usage of this feature.

After version 1.0 of the feature we can consider

• Scheduling backups using the admin UI
• Scheduling uploads of backups to S3 or other external services.

Why this feature is so important

Today most VPSs have a built-in backup and restore function, this easily allows you to backup and restore locally, but ties you in very hard to the initial VPS you chose. What if you decide to move from Amazon to Digital Ocean and so forth? You are easily looking at a few hours of work figuring backup and restore out.

Having a "kick ass" backup/restore story gives the Discourse community flexibility to move to another server without needing expensive and complicated process. It also allows existing communities to easily migrate to our recommended docker setup.

This feature also heavily assists people extending Discourse as you can easily download copies of sites you are working on and use them locally.

In my proposed implementation there are 2 technical hurdles:

Securely downloading backups

Having a backup hanging around in a /public/ folder (even with a hash obfuscating it) is a big security hole. If anyone gets hold of the URL you are in trouble. So when dealing with downloading these potentially big files we have 3 options:

1. Implement rack middleware that hijacks the connections and streams a file to an authenticated admin
2. Implement http://wiki.nginx.org/XSendfile to send the files to authenticate users
3. Less secure "obsfucated" timing out public link

For v1 I think we should implement 2 and 3, 2 being the default but configurable with site settings.

Where to run the job, getting progress

Backup and restore jobs can take a while to run. During this time we need to tell users "something is happening" and allow "cancel". If the job runs in the web worker, unicorn will go ahead and nuke it. If you run it with a background thread you may have trouble reaching it when the load balancer sends your status http call to another front end.

To resolve this we can either place sidekiq in a "single job" mode, kick the job to sidekiq and have it pump progress into the Message Bus. Or do the same thing in a background thread or forked process.

Personally, I would like backup and restore to work even if for whatever reason sidekiq is not running. It allows you to easily migrate off problem setups. My preference is either a fork like https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager/blob/master/lib/docker_manager/upgrader.rb#L49 or a background thread.

UI concerns

Once we get terminology sorted I would like a new tab for this functionality (only visible to admin)

It should display all the available backups and have a sub tab for logs (which are populated during backup / restore). We do not need an accurate progress bar with estimated completion time for v1. However we must clearly communicate that background job is running and disable all operations during this process.

We should not tell users to visit another tab (to move the site into maint mode) for a restore, instead simply present them with a bootbox. We should always keep a backup of "previous good" setup when doing a restore, in case someone makes a mistake and restores the wrong thing.

---

@zogstrip will be working on this feature.

Let us know if you have any feedback or need clarification.

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Tempest wrote:

When I visit https://meta.discourse.org/categories.json all of the permission values are set to null.

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Pablo Corral wrote:

Hi mates,

In one of my communities, we want to do an AMA (ask me anything). As you know, this is one of the things more interesting that you can find in Reddit, and the threaded discussions, in some way, helps to do it because is easy to detect the main author.

What would be the best way to do an AMA using discoure? The author should reply each message? The author should quote different questiosn and answer all in a new reply? What do you think is best?

Thanks!

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Kane York wrote:

Currently, the system user's avatar is this:

(note - I had to add a hack to get that to onebox - I added &x=.png to the end of the URL. that down as a bug)

I think it would be cool if we could come up with some themed avatar for the system user.

Thoughts, ideas, specific images?

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Sam Saffron wrote:

FYI I just posted a blog post about my Docker adventures:

samsaffron.com

Discourse in a Docker container

Sam's Spot - Sam saffron's web log

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Hrishikesh Thakre wrote:

Shortly, I will be working with a school for the using my discourse based forum to improve the communication between school and parents (as a pilot program). One of the request is to have both parent's email accounts connected with student's name i.e. @studentname connected to parent1@abc.com and parent2@abc.com .

The students by themselves will not have an email account as they will be less than 14 yrs of age.

Is this feature planned, or any suggestions on how to achieve it?

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Tedy Pranolo wrote:

Is it possible to create a topic that is only updatable (reply, edit) only by the author, but readable by everyone?

I'm thinking of an "updates/change log" topic where the author keep adding new replies as updates to the topic. To prevent noise, everyone else who would like to discuss the posts can only create "Reply as new topic".
While continuously reediting the original post is a way to do this, if the updates are long and numerous, a single post would be hard to read. Reediting the original post also prevents user from getting a nice notification and jumping to the latest post.

The single author filter is not ideal because it's an additional click and new visitors may not know of the feature. And if discussion is allowed in the topic and the author participates, this filter no longer works since it will mix "updates" with replies to comments.

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Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

I tend to leave a tab open in Chrome for days (or weeks) on meta.discourse.org, which seems to work OK, but I'm curious if there is a need to refresh the tab to get updated JavaScript pushed to the browser when the server gets updated to a new version of Discourse.

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Stuart Langridge wrote:

I'd like to be able to, via the API, create a Discourse topic but not have it show up until a defined time in the future. This is really handy for things like announcement posts, so I can create a new topic to announce a thing at some point before the release of the thing, and have the forum discussion become available automatically at release time without me having to do anything. Has this sort of feature been discussed? (I did take a glance at the code, but I'm not really a Ruby guy, and I fear walking through the code and changing every single request for a topic to include "and publish_time <= now"...)

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Kane York wrote:

The initial keyboard shortcuts, in the initial implementation, still try to scroll you to the bottom of all of the topics when you press jk on the topic list. This clearly doesn't work, instead putting you at the bottom of the loaded topics and immediately loading more.

Pressing K on the first topic, and J on the last one (when that's possible, e.g. on a mostly empty category) should be a no-op, not a wrap.

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Scott Schaffter wrote:

How feasible would it be to have a "select all" or check box for each topic in a category to run some action on - ie move, or delete?

The problem comes if you need to delete a bunch of posts or re-categorize them, it gets complicated / time consuming to do it for each topic.

Am I missing some bulk action? Is this on the road map?

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