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Category creep and information overload

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@Rob_Nicholson wrote:

(Apologies for the length but the background to the problem is needed)

I'd appreciate some thoughts on an impending problem with the CAMRA Discourse system and the potential overuse of categories. I notice that the number of categories on here is relatively short and I'm aware that the over-arching design ethos is as flat as possible and not deeply threaded or categorised architecture. I get this and I personally buy into it.

This is not specifically requesting a change but more of a chewing the fat kind of discussion. Hope that's okay... I've stuck this under UX because I couldn't see anywhere obvious to put it but it is about an impending UX problem.

CAMRA (campaign for real ale) as an organisation has a deeply routed habit of trying to categorise everything! It's one of it's failings but it's so ingrained that it's very hard to overcome. You should see their definition of a pub - runs to about six A4 pages.

The organisation is structured thus: central volunteer teams acting nationally, paid-staff at the office (working for the membership) and around 200 branches of varying sizes made up of volunteers - at a guess about 2,000 people.

There is a well documented breakdown of communication between CAMRA centrally and the so-called active members in the branches. I've been an advocate of a national forum system for many years. Initially they set-up a phpBB system which limped along but wasn't exactly buzzing. Part of the reason was that the central teams never really engaged. This was partially a mind-set problem and partially the phpBB solution.

So I've watched Discourse with much interest since it's inception and last year CAMRA launched its own Discourse implementation. It's already a success primarily because of the tagging system whereby member's of those central teams get notified when their name or group is mentioned. It's by far the single most important feature in Discourse and a very big reason of why it's already more successful than phpBB.

At the very start, I tried desperately to get them to come up with a clean category system. Just a point about my place in the organisation - I'm an annoying active member in one of those 200 branches. I've dabbled now and then in central teams but I'm certainly not part of the inner core. So all I can do is influence and advise. At the very start, their natural tendency was to create 50+ categories splitting topics into lots of tiny categories & sub-categories. For example, consider the "Support" category - they wanted to create categories for every individual system of which we have 20+.

The main problem here is the list of categories starting to swamp the user interface plus confusion by users as to which category to start a topic in. I've been partially successful in getting them to reduce the number of categories down.

But there is a problem looming. Historically most branches had their own private Yahoo group for local discussion. It works okay but there is a desire to move away from Yahoo (don't blame them!) plus there is no easy way to manage whether a person is a CAMRA member or not, i.e. authentication isn't linked to the membership system - which Discourse is.

So centrally they have decided to migrate all 200 branches to Discourse. And by default, everyone will see all the branches which will flood the UX with a very long sub-category list, the sub-category dropdown list will be unmanageable plus user's timeline will be flooded with posts from branches which they are not interested in. Imagine what this list would look like with 200 entries in it:

I'm aware that you can mute a category but that's too draconian. Once muted, it's very hard to find that category again. Out of those 200 branches, there is my own branch that I'm interested in but I'm also occasionally interested in some of the surrounding branches. At present, I use an Outlook rule to move those messages into their own sub-folder and I go look at them when I've got a moment spare. I don't want them in my main inbox as that's more higher priority stuff. I guess what I'm saying here is that this very useful idea of rules/separate folders mentality doesn't work in the much flater Discourse "Latest" and "Unread" views. Is there a solution here?

There is one other side effect of this category creep. Many CAMRA members are well over 50 and "Don't do IT" (see comments about markdown). They really don't and are proud of it. So one has to strive to make everything as simple as possible. Consider one branch being migrated to Discourse where they can see all open groups by default - they are going to be presented with a huge list of topics none of which are anything to do with their local branch. They are going to switch off immediately as they won't be able to see the wood for the trees.

My suggestion was that when a member is added to Discourse as part of a branch migration is that they only see two categories by default: the welcome category and the branch category (or probably sub-category). After they've been using the system for a while, they receive an email telling them about the rest of the categories and they can then go an subscribe to the categories they may be interested in.

Is any of this possible in Discourse? I think I'm sort of asking for a self-help subscription type system whereby you are presented with a list of all the categories and you can check/unchecked your membership of those categories - some of them may require further approval. Some of them are open and you can go straight in.

That will do for now!

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In:private doesn't find group messages (unless you're admin?)

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@carlokok wrote:

Doing a search for: "InputChildrenNamespace in:private" will show all posts containing that info if I'm an admin, but when there's a group message (ie owned by support) and the user is not an admin, but is part of that group, the post isn't shown. Is this known or something I'm doing wrong?

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Ansible Playbook to install Docker, Discourse and Postfix

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@chrisc wrote:

Though I'd post this here since I found a lot of useful help on this forum and perhaps if I leave a note regarding what I learnt and then implemented then it might help someone else in the future.

I have helped setup a Discourse forum at community.coops.tech using the official Docker install, Postfix doing incoming and outgoing email on the host, with measures to prevent backscatter on Debian Stretch.

The Ansible Playbooks are available at git.coop and the email setup is based on the mail-reciever Docker container plus this pull request (which is now merged) and the Postfix notes for using the host for outgoing email, with an additional Ruby script.

Some of the things in the Playbooks are specific to the Webarchitects environment they have been written for so they probably couldn't be directly used elsewhere, but if anyone would our help with installing Discourse like this then feel free to contact us.

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Can I use gmail smtp?

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@wiliamjoaquim wrote:

I would like to use google mail sending, can I enter the smtp from my personal google account?

smtp.gmail.com
door 465
email: myemail@gmail.com
senha: ******

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How to override assets with plugins?

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@l3est wrote:

I want to override one of the assets

app/assets/javascripts/discourse/components/date-picker.js.es6

and load this file instead

plugins/custom-plugin/assets/javascripts/date-picker.js.es6

is this possible ?

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Is it possible to limit screenshots?

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@SidV wrote:

Hello there...

I ask if it is possible to limit the number of screenshots that a user (or new_user maybe) could do in a post?

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Summary emails show oneboxed images in full size

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@tophee wrote:

It looks like there is a problem in how images are rendered in summary emails the summary includes a post with a onebox which includes an image. From what I can see, these images are displayed in their original size (i.e. the dimensions of the image on the original website).

When displayed in the onebox on the forum, the size is adjusted to the size of the onebox but this size adjustment does not seem to make it into the summary email.

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Community contributions to the official slack plugin

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@mcwumbly wrote:

It's only been a few days since this PR was created, but I have not received any responses or feedback on any of the other PRs I've created in the past 3 weeks either, which feels long compared to prior experience with PRs to discourse proper.

I'm wary of making any other changes on top of these, and certainly don't want to attempt any larger changes without input from the maintainers.

What's the current appetite for community contributions to this plugin?

Is there anything I can do better as a contributor to make things easier?

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Date bug looking weird

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@brunoedigital wrote:

This is for sure just on my forum as here it's not happening.

So basically I just wanted some help to where start looking to fix this:

Look at the dates there… Jun AMAMAM

It might a custom plugin I'm using to manage subscriptions, not sure.

Anyhow, any info is appreciated so I can sort this out.

Thanks!

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Long polling slowing down link back to Wordpress site

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@sunnyt7 wrote:

Continuing the discussion from Long message-bus HTTP requests? What are they for?:

I have put a link back to my Wordpress site in both a custom header, and a link in the burger menu.

I noticed that it takes a long time to load the Wordpress homepage though. When I Inspect Element > Network, I can see that it's the long polling slowing things down.

I have the WP Discourse plugin installed, with SSO enabled.

Any ideas on how I can stop this polling when navigating back to my homepage?

Thanks!

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How to re-enable bootstrap mode?

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@tophee wrote:

I failed to increase bootstrap mode min users before I reached the default of 50 users. I increased it to 100 and expected that that would automatically re-enable bootstrap mode until the new number of users is reached, but apparently this is not the case as new users are all TL0.

How can I re-enable bootstrap mode?

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Showing simple text with decorateWidget

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@Radulf wrote:

Hi

I started developing plugins for Discourse this week. I already finished my first one, that adds a button below each post that links to a homepage, depending on the post. Now, I'm on to my second project and I merely want to show some text after the name of the poster. It seems like decorateWidget is a nice way to go there, but I don't know how I get that to work. By basic copy + pasting, I was able to show a small icon, but simply showing text still eludes me. Here's my current code of the initializer:

import { withPluginApi } from 'discourse/lib/plugin-api'

function initializePlugin(api) {
  console.log(api)

  api.decorateWidget('poster-name:after', function(helper) {
    return helper.h('i.fa.fa-arrow-circle-up.home-button-icon');
  });

}

export default {
  name: 'youtrack-button',
  initialize: function() {
    withPluginApi('0.1', api => initializePlugin(api))
  }
}

Especially the decorateWidget part is merely copy + paste that I simplified a bit. Unfortunately I did not find any documentation for decorateWidget or h, which would probably solve these basic questions. So, how would I need to change the code to show the content of some string behind the name?

Thanks for your help!

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Showing the first few lines of a topic

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@mariolevitin wrote:

Hi,
The "Welcome to meta.discourse.org" topic is listed at the main page and the first few lines inside the topic is also shown. How can I achieve this? In my site I created a welcome topic but only the title is shown.
Thanks

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Should narrative bot be conversational, or step by step instructional?

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@DeanMarkTaylor wrote:

Consider making the instructions more step-by-step...

Some of the instructions can be difficult to parse as a non-Discourse user - making the instructions more step-by-step might also help non-native speakers follow along in addition to those who have trouble with instructions.

Some examples...

Quoting Instructions

Before

Select the text of whichever ↑ quote you prefer, and then press the Quote button that pops up over your selection – or the Reply button at the bottom of this post.

Below the quote, type a word or two about why you picked that one, because I’m curious :thinking:

After

  1. Select the text of whichever ↑ quote you prefer
  2. And then either:
    • Press the Quote button that pops up over your selection
    • Or the Reply button at the bottom of this post.
  3. Below the quote, type a word or two about why you picked that one, because I’m curious :thinking:

Quoting Not Found

Before

Hmm it looks like you didn’t quote me in your reply?

Selecting any text in my post will bring up the Quote button. And pressing Reply with any text selected will work, too!

After

Hmm it looks like you didn’t quote me in your reply?

Either:

  • Select any text to bring up the Quote button
  • Or: Pressing Reply with any text selected

Note I changed "Press the Quote button" etc to match "will bring up the Quote button" style consistently.

I know it's not to everyone taste - but we are trying to cover the basics here and ensuring they, the new user you want sticking around to follow.

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File Reference and Deletion, will it really be deleted?

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@xiasummer wrote:

I have a small server with only 20G of storage with my Discourse running on it. So I can't let people upload too big files——of course if it is very important it should still be uploaded, but if not so important, it should not.

So I set the biggest upload file size 100M.

But I see many not so important files uploaded and the back-up quickly increases.

Here is a really small file I uploaded as an example:

try file.csv (6 字节)

with codes to be

<a class="attachment" href="//discourse-meta.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/original/3X/f/8/f8c1d87006fbf7e5cc4b026c3138bc046883dc71.csv">try file.csv</a>

What if I just delete such codes. Will the file "try file.csv" really be deleted from the server and will not cause any more burden on Discourse Backup File?

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Change click behavior

Redis is not running

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@dogancan wrote:

Hello everybody,

After I've done the installation I did not get the activation mail. I tried everything in this topic

When I do the following command: more shared/standalone/log/rails/production.log
I get:

Error connecting to Redis on localhost:6379 (Errno::ECONNREFUSED) subscribe failed, reconnecting in 1 second.

Can you help me with this issue.

Best Regards.

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Discourse-SAML "BAD CSRF"

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@pfaffman wrote:

Trying to get SAML configured at a university. It looks like it's working, but then after login just gives [BAD CSRF"] on a page by itself.

Pinging @falco since he made the last commit. . .

Here are Apache logs that seem like they might have clues.

[Thu May 11 15:13:13.799020 2017] [proxy:debug] [pid 10895] proxy_util.c(2160): AH00942: HTTP: has acquired connection for (localhost)
[Thu May 11 15:13:13.799025 2017] [proxy:debug] [pid 10895] proxy_util.c(2213): [client 71.9.18.118:45630] AH00944: connecting http://localhost:7000/message-bus/e92d240660234736ae59d3b51696db83/poll to localhost:7000, referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/login
[Thu May 11 15:13:13.799031 2017] [proxy:debug] [pid 10895] proxy_util.c(2422): [client 71.9.18.118:45630] AH00947: connected /message-bus/e92d240660234736ae59d3b51696db83/poll to localhost:7000, referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/login
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.387752 2017] [proxy:debug] [pid 10443] proxy_util.c(2175): AH00943: http: has released connection for (localhost)
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.387780 2017] [deflate:debug] [pid 10443] mod_deflate.c(853): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] AH01384: Zlib: Compressed 14 to 36 : URL /message-bus/9180960f0ed3461f9e8419e8a29fd066/poll, referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581512 2017] [mod_shib:debug] [pid 10443] mod_shib.cpp(320): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] get_request_config created per-request structure, referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581606 2017] [ssl:debug] [pid 10443] ssl_engine_kernel.c(354): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] AH02034: Subsequent (No.13) HTTPS request received for child 5 (server discuss.rc.school.edu:443), referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581666 2017] [authz_core:debug] [pid 10443] mod_authz_core.c(835): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] AH01628: authorization result: granted (no directives), referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581710 2017] [mod_shib:debug] [pid 10443] mod_shib.cpp(917): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] shib_fixups entered in pid (10443), referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581739 2017] [proxy:debug] [pid 10443] mod_proxy.c(1160): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] AH01143: Running scheme http handler (attempt 0), referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins
[Thu May 11 15:13:29.581745 2017] [proxy_ajp:debug] [pid 10443] mod_proxy_ajp.c(738): [client 71.9.18.118:45588] AH00894: declining URL http://localhost:7000/message-bus/9180960f0ed3461f9e8419e8a29fd066/poll, referer: https://discuss.rc.school.edu/admin/plugins

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Hotmail users do not receive account verification email

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@wiliamjoaquim wrote:

I noticed that every new member who uses hotmail email does not confirm the account, I did some tests and the confirmation email is not sent to hotmail users, what can it be? I use the mailgun server!

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Why doesn't 404 page search locally instead of google?

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@pfaffman wrote:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-wrong-or-stupid-slug returns the

Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

page with some recent topics and at the bottom

Search this site

but it uses a Google search. This is worthless for sites that aren't indexed, if instead it returned a list of local searches, or, better, the search page.

This would come close to solving my "I can't guess the slugs" problem for an import.

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