Ronteras wrote:

Wouldn't it be handy if discourse will have the feature that will check the submitted link during the topic creation and will notify the author before he/she hits "create topic" that this link already exists in somewhere, in order to avoid similar topics?

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Sam Saffron wrote:

I would like to create this topic to inspire budding plugin authors.

As a user what is the most amazing plugin for Discourse you could imagineer?

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José F Romaniello wrote:

Single Sign On plugin using Auth0 for Social and Enterprise identity providers.

Location: http://github.com/auth0/discourse-plugin

What do I get by using Discourse with Auth0?

• Support for Active Directory / LDAP (see animated gif)
  • No matter if Discourse is on the cloud or on-prem, it will work transparently
  • Support for Kerberos too (configured by IP ranges)
  • Very easy configuration in the AD side, doesn't need open ports
• Support for other enterprise logins like SAML Protocol, Windows Azure AD, Google Apps, Salesforce, etc. All supported here: https://docs.auth0.com/identityproviders.
• Support for social providers without having to add OmniAuth strategies by hand. Just turn on/off social providers (see animated gif)
• Support for Single Sign On with other Discourse instances and any other application in your account (see animated gif.

Demo: https://ask.auth0.com

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Adding Active Directory / LDAP

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Adding Social Providers

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Single Sign On Between multiple Discourse forums

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Single Sign On with Windows Authentication

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Using Discourse Login Dialog instead of the Auth0 widget

You can keep using Discourse Login dialog and integrate only a specific connection from Auth0. It will show up as another button like the social providers.

Go to admin site settings for Auth0 and change the auth0_connection with the connection name you want to use from Auth0.

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Installation

• Create an account on Auth0 and register a new Rails application, note: ignore the rails tutorial in Auth0.

• Run in your discourse root folder:

$ rake plugin:install repo=https://github.com/auth0/discourse-plugin name=auth0
$ rm -rf tmp public/assets
$ rake assets:precompile

• Login as an adminstrator to your discourse setting using one of the pre-existing auth plugins.

• Configure the Auth0 plugin in the admin section

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̇

• Enjoy!

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Watchman Monitoring wrote:

I've invited many people to our forum.

However, I can't tell who hasn't accepted because the list is just "Showing the first 30 invites."

How can I see the rest? Is there a timeframe for being able to sort the table of information at the / users/[myuser]/invited route?

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Stephen Reinert wrote:

Most of the engineers on my team have desktops. I.e., some of our meetings are without a computer. We've been using Discourse on my team for various technical discussions (I really like it and how much it has evolved, BTW). It would be nice to print out a thread from Discourse or to send as a PDF to someone outside the group. The way the print output is formatted precludes this. One page of text turns into four pages of oddly formatted whitespace and non-essential info. This screenshot is an example of Print to PDF (my coworker's name under his avatar has been blacked out). The hard copy prints in the same way.

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John Grasty wrote:

First, I realize that Discourse is developed for use on Ubuntu, and I'm on my own venturing in the dangerous land of other distributions--let alone the BSDs. I know have a working installation of Discourse on a FreeBSD 10 server that didn't require massive fiddling (a few gems have issues compiling).

Second, I'm not a developer, and I have little (read none) Ruby experience. Sorry if I have missed something on the Kindergarden level.

Here's the situation:

• ImageMagick 6.8.0.7 works from the command line.
• The ImageMagick warning appears in the dashboard.
  • Yet, in the ruby console:
    2.0.0-p353 :002 > system("command -v convert >/dev/null;")
    => true

• I disabled the ImageMagick check in app/jobs/regular/generate_avatars.rb to get Discourse to attempt to use ImageMagick, but it fails. Here's the a sample of the log output:

  Started POST "/users/johngrasty/preferences/avatar" for 71.85.54.229 at 2014-02-18 02:48:02 +0000
  Processing by UsersController#upload_avatar as JSON
  Parameters: {"files"=>[#@tempfile=#, @original_filename="castle.jpg", @content_type="image/jpeg", @headers="Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"files[]\"; filename=\"castle for prayer card.jpg\"\r\nContent-Type: image/jpeg\r\n">], "username"=>"johngrasty"}
  Completed 200 OK in 31ms (Views: 0.3ms | ActiveRecord: 18.5ms)
  Failed to create avatar 120 for /uploads/default/9/703d3afcaef170f4.jpg from /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/default/9/703d3afcaef170f4.jpg[0]
  Failed to create avatar 240 for /uploads/default/9/703d3afcaef170f4.jpg from /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/default/9/703d3afcaef170f4.jpg[0]

• From the ruby console, this command works though Jobs::GenerateAvatars.new.perform(user_id: 2, upload_id: 8)

Is there any way to get more detailed logging to see why ImageMagick is not working? Once again, I know that this is an unsupported setup, so I don't expect any handholding, but a point in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

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Joel Uckelman wrote:

Continuing the discussion from NNTP support?:

First, some background: I'm Joel Uckelman, one of the developers of VASSAL, an open-source virtual tabletop program for boardgames. We used mail2forum to bridge our mailing list to our forum back when phpBB 2 was current. When phpBB went to version 3 and mail2forum didn't, I wrote a mailing list bridge which we've been using more or less successfully at our forum since 2009 or so. I would very much like to see Discourse have mailing list support so that switching to Discourse from phpBB is an option for us.

So, some thoughts, in no particular order:

• Should mailing list support be integrated or work with existing lists? The list bridge I wrote for phpBB is truly just a bridge. Mailing list software (Mailman, in my case) provides the list. There were some advantages to this approach: It was a lot less work, since I could rely on Mailman to handle mail properly, and any PHP (blech!) I didn't have to write was welcome. On the other hand, bridging forum posts to an existing list means that the list software doesn't know anything about forum accounts, etc., and as a consequence, users have to subscribe to the list manually, so you can end up with list subscribers who don't have accounts on the forum. This hasn't been much of a problem for us because the number of subscribers to our list is small, but I could see there being issues (confusion, mainly) if there were more subscribers.

• How granular should subscription be? My list bridge supports one list per subforum. It's not required that each subforum have a unique list, or any list at all. E.g. our Games in Progress subforum isn't hooked up to any list, the Test subforum has its own list, while the other eight subfora are bridged to the main list. The main list can be something of a firehose at times, but my reason for having it set up this way is that the list subscribers are mostly developers, team members, and some people who are a constant presence answering user questions---these are the people who want to see every message which comes through. But I could see someone wanting a bit more control over what they get by mail, too.

• How should bounces be handled? What I'm doing right now is letting Mailman handle bounces.

• Being able to start topics and reply to posts by mail, as well as suppressing reply notifications for list subscribers (you don't need to be emailed about replies if you're already geting posts by mail!) are mandatory features. Being able to unsubscribe from the list by mail is close behind, for me. Nothing else strikes me as terribly urgent.

• There are various things which can come in from the list side which we have to think about how to handle: attachments, quoting, ugly MIME parts (base64, quoted-printable, HTML), bounces, forgeries, spam. If you want to see what I did with, e.g., quoting, browse around the posts in our forum. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it's functional.

• Determining where incoming mail goes in the forum is not that hard, so long as we construct Message-Ids from which we can recover post IDs. We do have to decide what to do with incoming messages which aren't In-Reply-To any message we already have. Most of the time, these will be starting new topics, but it is possible that the message was sent by a broken mail client...

• I suspect that a lot of the infrastructure for handing email would also work for NNTP. (I think supporting NNTP would be neat, too, but email is my priority.)

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Sam Saffron wrote:

Discourse now ships with official hooks to perform auth offsite.

The Problem

Many sites wish to integrate with a Discourse site, however want to keep all user registration in a separate site. In such a setup all Login operations should be outsourced to a different site.

What if I would like SSO in conjunction with existing auth?

The intention around SSO is to replace Discourse authentication, if you would like to add a new provider see existing plugins such as: https://meta.discourse.org/t/vk-com-login-vkontakte/12987

Enabling SSO

To enable single sign on you have 3 settings you need to fill out:

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enable_sso : must be enabled, global switch
sso_url: the offsite URL users will be sent to when attempting to log on
sso_secret: a secret string used to hash SSO payloads. Ensures payloads are authentic.

Once enable_sso is set to true:

• Clicking on login or avatar will, redirect you to /session/sso which in turn will redirect users to sso_url with a signed payload.
• Users will not be allowed to "change password". That field is removed from the user profile.
• Users will no longer be able to use Discourse auth (username/password, google, etc)

What if you check it by mistake?

If you check enable_sso by mistake and need to revert to the original state and no longer have access to the console

run:

RAILS_ENV=production bin/rails c
irb > SiteSetting.enable_sso = false

Implementing SSO on your site

Discourse will redirect clients to sso_url with a signed payload: (say sso_url is https://somesite.com/sso)

You will receive incoming traffic with the following

https://somesite.com/sso?sso=PAYLOAD&sig=SIG

The payload is a Base64 encoded string comprising of a nonce and return_url. The payload is always a valid querystring.

For example, if the nonce is ABCD and return url is http://somesite.com. raw_payload will be:

nonce=ABCD&return_url=http%3A%2F%2Fsomesite.com, this raw payload is base 64 encoded.

The endpoint being called must

1. Validate the signature, ensure that SHA256 of PAYLOAD+sso_secret is equal to the sig
2. Perform whatever authentication it has to
3. Create a new payload with nonce, email, external_id and optionally (username, name, return_url)
4. Base64 encode the payload
5. Calculate a SHA256 hash of the Base64 encoded payload + sso_secret
6. Redirect back to http://discourse_site/session/sso_login?sso=payload&sig=sig

Discourse will validate that the nonce is valid (if valid it will expire it right away so it can no longer be used) it will attempt to:

1. Log the user on by looking up an already associated external_id in the SingleSignOnRecord model
2. Log the user on by using the email provided (updating external_id)
3. Create a new account for the user providing (email, username, name) updating external_id

Security concerns

The nonce (one time token) will expire automatically after 10 minutes. This means that as soon as the user is redirected to your site they have 10 minutes to log in / create a new account.

The protocol is safe against replay attacks as nonce may only be used once.

Reference implementation

Discourse contains a reference implementation of the SSO class:

A trivial implementation would be:

class DiscourseSsoController < ApplicationController
  def sso
    secret = "MY_SECRET_STRING"
    sso = SingleSignOn.parse(request.query_string, secret)
    sso.email = "user@email.com"
    sso.name = "Bill Hicks"
    sso.username = "bill@hicks.com"
    sso.external_id = "123" # unique to your application
    sso.sso_secret = secret

    redirect_to sso.to_url("http://l.discourse/session/sso_login")
  end
end

Future work

• We would like to gather more reference implementations for SSO on other platforms. If you have one please post to the extensiblity category.

• Add session expiry and/or revalidation logic, so users are not logged in forever.

• Create an API endpoint to log off users, in case somebody logs off the main site.

• Consider adding a discourse_sso gem to make it easier to implement in Ruby.

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Michael wrote:

We have created a plugin which allows remote sites to log in a user while linking to Discourse.

It does require the remote site to have some knowledge about the user being present in Discourse. Currently this can be done by looking up the user in the Discourse user database, or requiring certain usernames or email addresses to be present. (That's a different problem, and we will provide some remote API calls for that soon)

The plugin can be found at https://github.com/discoursehosting/discourse-sso/

The plugin allows logging on by user id, email address or username in a secure way.

It basically boils down to the method we described earlier.

Thank you @jhilden for providing the basic architecture for this.

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Jeff Atwood wrote:

This would really just be a "CSS generator".

How about a page that has nice color selectors and then nicely named coloring categories, like:

• Primary background color
• Secondary background color
• Tertiary background color
• Primary text color
• Secondary text color
• Primary link color
• Secondary link color
• Button background
• Button background hover
• Button text
• Button text hover
• Last poster highlight color

It doesn't need to be super detailed or advanced or able to do everything. Let people choose the colors on that page, and then click "Generate Style" which outputs a CSS page on the pre-existing Style page which they can then apply.

Most of the hours of work in theming Discourse are "replace #fff with #333, replace link colors with orange, replace #333/other dark with #ccc/other light". Having a simple styling CSS generator would get us 80% of the way there, and then we would be able to just fine-tune the colors of things.

(this text belongs to @DanYouhon but I really wanted it here for discussion and could not wait, sorry Dan!)

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Martina Mitseva wrote:

Hello, me and my colleagues have faced difficulties with the Discourse server, the back button does not work sometimes. The speed of the forum is very slow. May be there is a problem with the set up? Can you please have look at our website and give me some solutions? This is our page: http://forum.rentalsunited.com/

Thanks in advance. : )

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Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe wrote:

A word of warning

This is the "I have no idea what I'm doing; I'm just pushing buttons until the lights are on" edition. My distro of choice is Fedora, and I wanted to play with Discourse, so I tried getting it to work on my own machine for checking it out. This is probably definitely not how you would set Discourse up to actually run a public instance on Fedora or other RedHat-ish distros like CentOS, unless you feel like getting pwned.

I have never in my life used Postgres nor Ruby, so whatever I'm doing here is probably the opposite of what you should be doing. But I did manage to get a Discourse homepage at localhost:3000, so if that's all you care about, read on.

That said

This is a pretty fresh install of Fedora 18, so chances are that I caught the necessary packages for running discourse. Here they are:

yum install ruby rubygem-bundler postgresql redis postgresql-server pgadmin3 ruby-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel libpqxx-devel postgresql-contrib

Run postgresql-setup initdb, then edit /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf, replacing "ident" with "trust" for the 127.0.0.1/32 and ::1/128 entries.

Next, service postgresql start and service redis start.

From this point on, you don't need elevated privileges anymore.

Run pgAdmin III (just type "pgad" on the activities screen). File -> Add Server. Enter "localhost" for Host (and for Name, I guess), and click Ok. The server should now be in the list on the left. Expand, right click "Databases" -> New Database. The Database name is discourse_development. The same way, add a database named discourse_test.

Now right click "login roles", then "New login role". Enter your user id as the role's name, and on the "privileges" tab choose "superuser" (yeah, that sounds like something your local DB admin is going to chastise you for. Do not blame me.), then "Ok". Do the same thing with the name "vagrant".

Now you can continue from https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/DEVELOPER-ADVANCED.md, starting with step 6 in "First Steps" (you don't have to make any changes to the files in step 6; just copy them).

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Michael wrote:

Yes! Since plugins are now able to override handlebars templates (thanks again, @zogstrip ) we have finally been able to create a clean Google AdSense plugin for Discourse.

It's available at https://github.com/discoursehosting/discourse-adsense

To install:

• Make sure you're on latest! The changes that made this plugin possible have been committed at December 31.
• Run rake plugin:install repo=http://github.com/discoursehosting/discourse-adsense in your discourse directory
• In development mode, run rake assets:clean
• In production, recompile your assets: rake assets:precompile

This plugin will be automatically made available to DiscourseHosting.com customers by the end of next week.

To use:

• Go to Admin -> Settings -> AdSense
• Enter your AdSense publisher ID (ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
• Create new ad slots within your AdSense account (728x90 for desktop, 320x50 for mobile)
• Copy the slot id # numbers (ten digits shown in the ID column) in the Discourse settings
• Enable the slots you want to use

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Marcus wrote:

In IE9 click on discourse-logo won't get you back on the homepage view. Is it possible to fix that (although it is the minimum browser to support)?

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Johan wrote:

Currently, when clicking the back button(on posts in particular), it scrolls to the top of the page, and just sits there until the previous page appears. It shows no signs of work being done and can get quite confusing at times because of the extra scroll to top which can look like a page load in itself. (Which makes the brain think you have accidentally double-clicked the back button)

What about fading out the current page (or just the content) and showing a loading icon until the previous page is ready to be shown?

Will demonstrate what I mean when I get home.

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Benjamin Kampmann wrote:

Heyah,

I love the new plugin interface you guys build, but one thing that still boggles me is how you were planning on supporting custom database models and migrations through plugins.

Sure there is the PluginStore but that only does key-value-mappings, which for some cases - knowing we have a SQL-Database to our disposal – is just a cumbersome solution. Especially since rails with the whole Models and Migrations has a decent system to even manage updates. There are few plugins in the back of my head, I'd like to work on which would require some more extended usage of Database access but I'm not sure how to structure those or if that is even possible. But I'm not an expert in Rails interna, so I was wondering if you had any example plugin using the SQL-Database, Models and Migration structure that I could look at.

Thanks.

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Tom Spilman wrote:

The first time login to the site things are a bit confusing...

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It doesn't suggest that you can even create a new account from here. A simple string like "Select your preferred service to login or create a new account." would make things a bit clearer IMO.

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Martin Heidegger wrote:

When I try to edit any field in the UI on a iPhone then the UI focuses on a different field which makes it really hard (almost impossible) to use any input field. Including the login form and the new topic form. Do you have the same issue? Is this only a iOS issue?

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Ye Cao wrote:

I would like to custom navigation bar area, which are navigation-bar tab elements.
Besides standard navigation bar elements shows after installation: Latest, New, Unread, StarredThis forum has tab Top added and categories is removed
I wonder how to make this happens, either by admin configuration/ plugin/ modify source code?
I am also not sure if I post this top at right category. If not, please advice me too.
Many thanks!

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Nick Caldwell wrote:

So I had big plans to tinker with my little test setup on Digital Ocean to force Discourse to serve purely with SSL, but I must admit defeat, mainly due to a bit of an energy deficit at this point. But I'd like to get my install usable and secure for more people, so I'd really like a step-by-step guide on enabling SSL in a Docker install.

There are already tutorials on setting up a self-signed cert on a DO Ubuntu droplet, so that stage could be readily duplicated or just pointed to. Maybe something on non-self-signed certs would be useful too.

I figure it's mostly a case of altering one of the yml config files, but it's the whole "do a regex to find a bit of a config file to override" part that spooks me a bit.

Hope this isn't unreasonable, but it's probably the only serious sticking point with Discourse on Docker right now.

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