Jeff Atwood wrote:

Most cloud virtual machine providers do not set up swapfiles as part of their server provisioning.

If you are running the recommended 2 GB of memory for Discourse, a swap file is technically not required, but can be helpful just in case your server experiences memory pressure. With a swap file, rather than randomly terminating processes with an out of memory error, things will slow down instead.

This can be done at any time from the command line on your server.

Set up a 1 GB swap file

Adding a swap file gives Discourse some extra beathing room during memory-intensive operations. 1GB swap should suffice, though if you are attempting the minimum memory configuration you should set up a 2GB swap.

In the shell you have opened to your droplet, do the following:

1. write out a 1 GB file named 'swapfile'

   dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1024k

2. tell linux this is the swap file:

   mkswap /swapfile

3. Activate it

   swapon /swapfile

Add it to the file system table so its there after reboot

1. open fstab in nano

   nano /etc/fstab

2. paste the following line in at the bottom

    /swapfile       none    swap    sw      0       0

Set the swappiness to 10 so its only uses as an emergency buffer

echo 10 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
echo vm.swappiness = 10 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Change the permissions so only root can read and write to this file

chown root:root /swapfile
chmod 0600 /swapfile

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Nathan Rijksen wrote:

As far as I can tell there is currently no way to set what the default notification settings are for new users. It would be very useful if we could control this as it affects your daily returning visitors (with the default settings, people might forget they posted and only return a week later when they receive a notification).

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Bill Ayakatubby wrote:

When a post is taller than the viewport, the bookmark icon doesn't get updated to indicate it's been read--even when a post after it has been marked as read. Most recently, it happened with a topic post in Chrome 27 on Win Vista, but I've also seen it happen with replies and in Firefox release. Navigating away from the topic and returning correctly shows the post as having been read.

f7c3b3a7afc75960.png1440x870

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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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Trevor Williams wrote:

Are there any themes for Discourse yet? Here's a couple screenshots of what I'm working on ATM:

a1a6f1260ebcb974.png1233x625

e745dad083f84e5c.png1233x1133

It's still in it's early stages and that was done in 19 hours. It'll take at least a week or two for everything to finished.

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Paul Apostolos wrote:

As I documented in this post

Incoming email (new topics or replies) with an attachment of any size or type is simply not processed by Discourse.

No notification is sent to the sender or the site admin that the email is not processed, it just fails.

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Alexandre Angelim wrote:

I'm having some trouble when trying to use OneBox with Youtube https links. When trying the same video using http, it works just fine.

This is the error I'm getting: Errno::ECONNRESET - Connection reset by peer: in net/protocol.rb:141You can find the full stack trace in this gist: https://gist.github.com/angelim/9728162

If I update the Gemfile to use OneBox master it works perfectly. When I insert the video url the preview show a screenshot of the video, which I believe is the expected behavior for that branch.

It could be an environment problem, because the same link is working here. I'm using Ruby compiled with openssl and readline.

This is the video I'm testing. Not that I'm a fan It was at the first page of Youtube.

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Nathan Rijksen wrote:

Eager as I am I enabled this experimental feature and started adding some badges, but I can't quite figure out how to give someone a badge. I realize as this is experimental that this functionality simply might not exist yet. I am only posting here in case the functionality does exist and I am too blind to find it.

Thanks!

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Michael John Kirk wrote:

Continuing the discussion from Patterns for managing a lot of "private forums":

We're adding about 5k read restricted categories and a corresponding 5k groups.

I was hesitant about adding this as a bug, as it's possible we're using categories outside of their intended purpose. But I don't know of any reason not to have thousands of categories.

We're creating the categories in the background via sidekiq while the app continues to serve web traffic. We're seeing the app processes balloon upon receiving some traffic. They'll boot up around 200MB and then grow to 800MB over the course of 5 mins/100 requests.

If we stop sidekiq, memory stabilizes, so it seems pretty clearly related to this process. Also, it seems to be compounding with the number of categories. E.g. Shortly after starting the import, we'd see them grow to 400MB after 10 mins/200 requests.

I'm really not sure what's causing it. A shot in the dark was related to the categories message bus broadcast, which happens after creating each category and includes the complete list of categories. The serialized message is currently about 400k.

Pursuing that angle now - but I'm really not confident that it's the cause. Or what to do about it if it is.

Happy Friday night!

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David McClure wrote:

We will be deploying discourse primarily as an open forum for users of our products to discuss features, bugs, usage, etc. Our customers still often need a private channel to discuss certain issues, however. To date, they are all used to emailing 'support', where a group of us can respond and stay copied on the conversation.

But I'm hoping to steer folks toward the forum where possible to encourage people to use the open resources on the forum. Worst case, we will just end up replying to the emails with links to the relevant topics, but this also tends to make some of us less likely to go find the conversation on the forum.

Also then we can take advantage of features like:

• mentioning particular folks who are best able to help with a given issue
• limiting the noise on email
• linking to related topics in the gutter

This kind of request has come up before, but I haven't found any answer as to how people are handling this type of use case yet.

@lightyear - what have you guys been doing for the requirement below? Have you been handling that aspect of things with discourse?

Some previous similar discussions:

Private forums or discussion threads:

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Alexandre Angelim wrote:

I'm a Ruby developer and interested in contributing to Discourse. Right now my Javascript skills are very poor and I apologize if this is not the place to ask this.

In some view files I'm seeing what I consider an odd pattern, which is to define a class and reopen it immediately after.

For example: in jsapp/models/composer_message.js the class is defined without any functions and we can some function implementations right afterwords, reopening the class.

Discourse.ComposerMessage = Em.Object.extend({});
Discourse.ComposerMessage.reopenClass({

`

Is there a particular reason for this to be done in such a way?

Thank you.

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Graeme Stuart wrote:

Hi,

I have a very small discourse forum (forum.smartspaces.dmu.ac.uk) that I set up in January as part of an energy saving project in Leicester in the UK. The project is a collaboration between the City Council and my University and involves 25 public buildings around the city (a pool of thousands of potential users). The forum is intended as a tool for building a community of like-minded people who work in or with these buildings.

We have already gathered a small group. After nearly three months there are now about 20 users registered, including some key people such as the energy managers and people directly working in sustainability but also some early adopters from buildings where there is already strong awareness of energy issues. About half of the users are actually directly involved in the project and half have joined based on our efforts so far. I have spoken to some users who are very comfortable with the concept of a forum but others who were sceptical at first and had to be 'encouraged' to contribute (and are now posting independently).

What I want to know is, how do I build a community around this small core? How do I keep the existing users engaged in the forum whilst also attracting new users? How do I support the disparate individuals and groups scattered amongst the thousands of building users to coalesce into a community around the forum? Importantly, how do I reach out to building users who may not be used to the concept of an online forum? The target audience don't know they need a forum yet (I am certain some of them do need one). Many potential users will never have used one before and those who have may have prejudices based on their experiences.

An empty site is not very interesting so its obvious that in these early stages I need to seed the site with as many interesting discussions as possible. I have done a bit of this but I had to slow down because the site was just me talking to myself. I think this was enough to demonstrate the functionality of the tools to my colleagues and it did start a few short conversations.

We are now at the stage where we have half a dozen users who regularly post and create topics. But, just as the earliest posts were all me, it is beginning to feel like everything is a conversation between the same individuals. This may mean we are talking about a very limited range of subjects and I am worried this may put new user off. We are mostly energy geeks and professionals, we want to attract normal people.

I think we need a critical mass of users if the forum is to become a valuable resource for a wider user base. Is there any target size I should be aiming for? I have a target of 50 active users in the next few months. I also think that attracting the right kind of users and the right mix of users is important. I want a range of perspectives from senior managers, financial people, energy experts (covered), security guards, cleaners, sceptics, obsessives and people who can link out via twitter or wherever to lots of potential users. People who are going to start good topics and have different opinions. This is difficult when the number of users is so small and becomes easier with more users.

Does anyone have any advice or want to share their experiences? Is meta the right place for this discussion? Its not the usual feature request or bug report.

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Utkarsh Agarwal wrote:

I just recently installed discourse and now i'm trying to upgrade version 0.9.8.10 to 0.9.8.11. It's a fresh install with no changes done to any files or any conversations on the forum.

Here's the Log:

$ cd /var/www/discourse && git pull
error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge:
	app/assets/javascripts/admin/controllers/admin_user_badges_controller.js
	app/assets/javascripts/admin/routes/admin_user_badges_route.js
	app/assets/javascripts/admin/templates/user_badges.js.handlebars
	app/helpers/embed_helper.rb
	db/migrate/20140318203559_add_created_at_index_to_posts.rb
	db/migrate/20140320042653_facebook_user_infos_username_can_be_nil.rb
	plugins/poll/config/locales/client.es.yml
	plugins/poll/config/locales/client.it.yml
	plugins/poll/config/locales/server.es.yml
	plugins/poll/config/locales/server.it.yml
	vendor/assets/javascripts/break_string.js
Please move or remove them before you can merge.
Aborting
Updating 80bfdee..ad71490

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

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Michael wrote:

Hey all. I'm looking for the CSS class or ID that gets used after clicking on a topic then highlights the specific reply. Not sure if I'm explaining it right. It seems to highlight the entire .contents class but not sure how to change that specific area. This solution doesn't seem to work for me.

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Alexandre Angelim wrote:

I've just implemented WindowsLive omniauth strategy for Discourse.

I have a lot of hotmail users(Mostly women. I can't find a reason for that) and I think it would be interesting to offer them the option.

I found this thread: https://meta.discourse.org/t/adding-additional-omniauth-strategies-via-plugin/4290 and my understanding is that its preferable to implement the strategies as plugins.

Is there a working example of a strategy being implemented in such way?

Thank you

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Alexandre Angelim wrote:

Hi guys,

When I'm searching in Chrome for Mac, the suggestions list is being hidden during the ajax request. Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem?

It's fine in Firefox and Safari for Mac. I have disabled all by extensions, to no avail.

Thank you

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Michael Downey wrote:

Continuing the discussion from Discourse General Polish:

FWIW, we've had a couple users complain about this (on both Chrome OSX and Chromebooks). The workaround is to just keep typing until results appear, but some people don't keep going once they see it "disappear".

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Sam Saffron wrote:

As we approach 1.0 I feel we need to spend a bit more time focusing on UI polish. I am creating this topic to collate issues I would like to see fixed.

Hopefully some people looking to help out with Discourse can try working on some of these.

Issues I want fixed

• Footer padding gets out of sync: start typing a new topic in the composer ... size it big ... got to random topic ... footer padding is not added so you can not see the last post on topic. (workaround, resize composer once more so footer padding is added). This need to be added everywhere automatically. Including admin screens.

• Expanding user card (click on my avatar ) has a shoddy jarring visual effect, it sizes the window twice. Instead just setting a fixed width and sliding down if it needs extra height.

• When you make a new post it jitters, first render renders without your avatar, then its re-rendered with avatar. Jitter must go, needs to be seamless. Feel free to try on try.discourse.org

• Uneeded "Loading ..." images when clicking between tabs. When you navigate from "latest" to "new" we unconditionally show a "Loading ..." gif, this should only show up if you are waiting longer than say 500ms.

• We unconditionally reload topic page if you click on "title". instead it should scroll you to top if post 0 is already in memory. Same for in between posts navigation (eg quoting and so on)

• Reloading a page with a big draft will often lead to this rendering bug:

Pasted image797x385 33.5 KB

• Mac Chrome. Navigating back using the back button to the latest page is "glitchy" if you have scrolled down a topic. It rerenders the title undocked (as if you are on post 1) and then navigates back, this looks really glitchy

• Synchronized editor, Ghost (open source) has a feature where it ensures the line you are typing in the composer is in view in the preview. This really helps composing longer posts like this or situations where space is tight. Whoever takes this needs to make sure perf does not suffer.

• Mac OSX - Chrome ... while typing stuff in search box search box is half visible.

Experiments needed

• Page transitions: nodebb and stripe use a technique that fades out the page you are leaving and in the page you are going to. see: http://community.nodebb.org/category/3/nodebb-development and click on a topic. This can either be over-the-top or help usability - it is worth an experiment, if done in a subtle way it can look pretty good (probably a default off thing for now)

Am I missing any other polish issues here?

If you are helping out with Discourse and would like to take any of these on, reply here.

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Sam Saffron wrote:

This onebox:

https://gist.github.com/jlhawn/1f61751f2bd2a0a7df4d

vvv

^^^

Is blank ...

@eviltrout

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Sam Saffron wrote:

We had a naive implementation for Gist oneboxes, however it failed miserably due to dynamic loading:

In particular this:

To resolve this issue:

The Gist oneboxer should use a similar approach to the blob oneboxer

1. It must take care of truncating huge files
2. It must take care of displaying gists with multiple files

Syntax highlighting is to be handled by our pre-existing syntax highlighting engine, all the onebox is to do is to decorate divs with the guessed syntax.

---

I thought of possibly using therubyracer to evaluate the gist js, but it inserts stylesheets. Additionally there is a possibly iframe approach but it will be both slower (and impact rendering) and more fragile.

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