Initial site setup

Meta
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I’m documenting a few pieces of initial site setup for the forum here.

Please do leave comments and questions on how you’d like to see things setup – we’re just getting started!

Uncategorized → Discussion

The Uncategorized category is labeled as Discussion instead. You don’t have to add a category or tags. This is the default category.

Basic Categories

Other than the general Discussion category, we have:

  • Meta, where this is posted, for site feedback
  • Developers, for developer’s building core and plugins
  • Google Group (Read Only), which will eventually be synced with the existing Google Group

More categories can be added over time, plus you can add tags to any post even without a category, like discourse

Reply by Email

Working on setting up reply by / post by email. Posting to the main Discussion category should work with post@talk.tiddlywiki.org.

Reaction Plugin

If you hover over the “heart” button, you have a handful of emoji to “react” to a post with, not just a heart.

Screen Shot of the Reaction Plugin Settings - laughing, open_mouth, cry, angry, hugs
Screen Shot of the Reaction Plugin Settings - laughing, open_mouth, cry, angry, hugs1536×844 65.5 KB

This is customizable, let us know what emoji – reactji! – you might like to see.

Other Logins

Right now we just have email / password based login enabled. Discourse can have Google, Twitter, Discord chat, and Github account logins supported, so you don’t have to remember another password.

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Should we enable logging in with Google and perhaps Github accounts to make it easier for community members from the Google Group to join?

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Yes that’s a good point — most of those Groups members will have Google accounts.

Ok, I’ll put that on my list to turn on those two login types.

I have to talk to Jeremy about which developer credentials to use for GitHub and Google and/or I’ll setup something with my own credentials to start.

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Fantastic, thank you Boris, looks great.

Great, I’m sure it would be sensible to start with a small list.

Excellent, that would be very helpful.

Ah, good point. Presumably I should setup special accounts in each case?

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If at all possible, it would be great to have at least one way sync up and running before we make the announcement in the group. Otherwise, people attempting to use it in anger will risk bifurcating things.

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Looks like we have one way sync of the Google groups up and running, thank you @boris

@jeremyruston I was thinking that you may want to just announce in the group that Tuesday’s call will have details about a new community forum. That would drum up interest for the call and then the actual announcement could be made at that time.

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I must admit the Google groups integration is very impressive, especially how it corelates usernames between Discourse and GG. Thank you for setting this up @boris

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Thanks again @boris, I’m enjoying poking around.

I’m struggling to setup “mailing list mode” though (I never visit the GG forum on the web, and rely on email access instead). I’ve seen references in the docs, but it seems it has to be configured?

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I had a look and with newer versions of Discourse, the “enable mailing list mode” user preference is disabled by default.

I have turned on the setting as a user preference. You can go to your Account > Preferences > Email and check the box.

I don’t recommend this for all users, but I can understand you’re used to the default mode of GG.

I also don’t have any experience with how this works with the GG mirroring we’re doing. Presumably you get those emails too — but can’t reply to them. I suppose you could “Mute” the GG category here so you don’t get those emails twice.

The notifications per category can be set per category and per topic thread (as well as applied to tags) with the bell icon at the top or bottom of threads.

Without looking it up, I think this is roughly how those notifications are set:

  • Watching — get a notified for each new topic
  • Tracking — get notified for the first post only
  • Normal — get notified if you are @-mentioned
  • Muted — don’t receive notifications. In the web interface, appears in a muted area

In all cases, if you interact with a topic thread by commenting, you are switched to “Watching”.

So, without mailing list mode set, users can choose to get email notifications on a per category basis. With it set, categories, tags, and topic threads can be Muted.

Hope that helps — I had to go figure it out myself and I think I got the explanation right.

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Thanks @boris it’s all working well for me at the moment.

I am however seeing this message on the bottom of the emails:

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Is that a limit we can increase?

Many thanks!

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It might be a good idea to post on the Google group and explain the mailing list features available with Discourse. There will surely be other users who also prefer to interact with the forum via email.

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Yes I just got a similar message from Mailgun, the email sending API that is in use!

I’ll monitor it and see about increasing it. I’m not sure if it’s a Discourse setting as well.

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Ok, the Mailgun setting is not related, although I have posted to Team about the email volume needing an upgraded paid account.

But in fact Discourse does limit emails sent! If anyone like Jeremy has “enable mailing list mode”, you may very well cross the 100 emails limit.

I’ve set it to unlimited, so anyone who is email first should get them all.

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Thanks @boris much appreciated

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Very late, I wanted to congratulate you and thank @boris for setting up a Discourse :sunglasses:

I’ve been hosting the French Discourse since 2015 (https://forum.tiddlywiki.fr/), so I’ll be able to close it soon :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Just out of curiosity, and maybe I missed it written elsewhere (if then, could you point me to this info): is this Forum about TiddlyWiki …made with TiddlyWiki? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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This forum uses free, open source forum software from https://discourse.org/