Discourse updates and tweaks

Technology Infrastructure and Services
1

There was an old thread named Updates to this Discourse Site but I wasn’t sure if that thread was meant to be extended 7 years later :laughing: or if the participants wanted to be copied there.

@jamie updated Discourse this week. :clap: :partying_face:
…and I wanted to see what was new. While I was at it I finally remembered to check on a few issues we’d had with Discourse previously and was happy to discover that some of them are solved or easily solved. Ironically those fixes have nothing to do with the recent upgrade and have been possible for awhile now.

  1. Replying to Discourse mail through Thunderbird just works
    When we first began using Discourse to organize our program team we thought that Discourse mail features would allow people to follow Discourse group discussions through email and respond with behavior just like an email list. This would be useful for people who were accustomed to working that way and wouldn’t coerce them to use a new interface over the web if they preferred not so. But we discovered a problem with the way Thunderbird responded to Discourse threads. The issue was already identified by the Discourse community years ago. I’ hadn’t checked on it in awhile but it seems this has been solved for several years now. I think I’ve been replying to Discourse notifications through Thunderbird lately and hadn’t even thought about it.

  2. Google search prompt for no results
    Recently it was brought to our attention that Discourse offers a prompt to search this forum using Google’s search engine if it does not find any results for local search. This does appear to be hardwired into Discourse and there are no simple admin configuration options to turn it off however you can edit the Discourse theme to hide it. I’ve added the following custom css to the theme through the admin interface. Saving here in case we need to apply it again after a future upgrade.

.no-results-suggestion {
    display: none !important;
}

.google-search-form {
  display: none !important;
}
  1. Using category slug for email subjects
    Users can optionally receive emails for updates on threads or categories they are following. The Subject line of these emails can be customized. How the subjects appears can vary based on what kind of email it is but for most post related messages by default the subject appears as [Community Title] [category] Topic title. When setting up a category you can specify a short name or “slug” for that category that appears in urls. I wanted to know if that could be used in the email subject lines instead of the full category name which is sometimes very long. Sadly I don’t think this is available. See other related post and code.
1 Like