Getting Started with Discourse

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wiki Note: this topic is a wiki page where we’re collecting tips and tricks that will help you get started with Discourse. It is maintained by @bartv, @LoboTommy and @Fweeb, but anyone can make edits. Feel free to contribute, but if you’re unsure about an addition discuss it in a reply first!

Table of contents

  1. Login to your account
  2. Navigating topics
  3. What became of signatures
  4. Watching topics, categories & tags
  5. Quirks
  6. How-to: Table of Contents

Login to your account

You can log in with your existing Blender Artists account. However, if you used any special characters in your username you may find that Discourse updated it. If you can’t log in, log in using your email address instead.

You can also log in using your Blender Cloud ID as long as you used the same email address there.

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Navigating Topics

To quickly move through large topics, use the ‘navigator’ on the right of the posts list. Click on the dates on top and bottom to quickly move to the beginning and end, or drag the blue slider to select another date. On mobile devices you’ll see a more compact version of the navigator at the bottom of your screen.

0%202018-05-06%2016-41-34

With the keyboard
  • J and K: Next and previous post.
  • Page Up and Page Down: Scroll up and down.
  • Home and End: Go to the top or bottom of the page.
Additional ways to quickly traverse threads
  • Clicking on a thread title to jump to the first post.
  • Clicking on last activity dates or times to jump to the last post.
  • Clicking on a user avatar then the number of posts box (only visible if > 1) to show only those messages. From there you can follow their, and or your, conversations via the expand / collapse arrows and quotes if employed.
  • Clicking on quoted avatars and expand / collapse arrows to follow an exchange, this skips / squeezes out unrelated comments.

Pages aren’t natively implemented, however… (click the expand arrow to the right please)

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What became of signatures

Discourse does not support signatures, but instead shows your information in your profile card. Click on a username or avatar image to see one. You can edit your information and background images in your profile settings.

Here’s an example:

image
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Watching topics, categories & tags

Coarse adjustments to notification settings are available in your user Preferences. The following is an example of minimal Notifications settings should you like some respite from said.

Press P key > click the Cog > Preferences > Notifications > Adjust settings > Save (at page bottom)

WatchingDiscourseEg0
WatchingDiscourseEg0756×343 4.12 KB


Should you wish to focus on or Mute certain Categories or Sub Forums the following hopefully serves as a visual primer.

WatchingDiscourseEg
WatchingDiscourseEg782×643 13 KB


For Tags it’s the same process just click Tags instead of Categories at step one and proceed as above from there.



Courtesy of @Millani, some finer grained per thread controls for the above follow:


You can choose how you wish to be notified by updates for a topic by clicking on the Normal button at the bottom of the thread.

image

With the keyboard
  • M then W: Watching
  • M then T: Tracking
  • M then R: Normal
  • M then M: Muted

Another option for muting Notifications is to browse anonymously by logging out.
Ctrl Shift Del and or tin foil optional :face_with_head_bandage:.

You can see all unread messages on topics which you’re tracking by clicking on the appropriate link at the bottom of the page while you’re there.

Unread Topics.png1272×179 28.8 KB

With the keyboard
  • G + U: Unread.
  • G + N: New.

Type ? to see all shortcuts. You may need to hold Shift on your device.

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Quirks

Discourse can intercept and commandeer some typical browser keyboard shortcuts.
Page search Ctrl F can sometimes bring up the site search. Should you want the typical behaviour multiple Ctrl Fs will toggle between them with each press.

Some threads haven’t been migrated to Discourse yet (It’s being worked on). When encountered you’ll get a “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” message. In such cases you can prepend oldsite. to the URL in the addressbar or bookmark. For example:

blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?312052-MakeWalk-three-click-mocap-retargeting

becomes

oldsite.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?312052-MakeWalk-three-click-mocap-retargeting

and is viewable in the interim.

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3 Likes
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No; Discourse has no pagination.

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@bnzs You spend more time reading dates or topics? Try hovering over the post times to display the date and time. Everything is in chronological order as before, unless you expand replies (sometimes) or old posts get edited. idgi

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thx for this

You spend more time reading dates

no, but i want to clearly see date and time, and i don’t care how much days ago it been - this is empty of information

nice very nice engine.
i hope developers are really serious reasons to move site to this engine because for now i do not like at all new engine, it remind me something like f** facebook where is no structure and chaos reigns everywhere.

1 Like
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I would like to add the following. Can someone confirm if the second point is correct?

Watching Topics

You can choose how you wished to be notified by updates on a topic by clicking on the round button bellow the “navigator”

Tracking
Tracking1105×1180 78.7 KB

You can then see all unread message on topics which you tracking by clicking on the appropriate link on the bottom of the page.

Unread%20Topics
Unread%20Topics1272×179 28.8 KB

1 Like
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It is, you can also pop up those links amongst others by pressing the = key.

@all Keep the timesavers and tips coming please. Thanks.

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Setting no, but relative dates in posts can be hacked via CSS override. Get a plugin that lets you set CSS and then use something like:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("blenderartists.org") {
  /* Things like "2m" stay, but become "2m ago || real-date-that-doesn't-change" */
  .relative-date::after {
	  content: " ago || "attr(title);
  }
}

If I figure how to do it for index pages, I will post it too (trickier on first look).

Mouse hover is a waste when eyes can do it on a glance (the text is already grayed, so no, showing it is not TMI). Having to open the 3-dot thingy to see what is avaliable is also slow (designed decided like and share are more important than flag and bookmark… maybe some prefer bookmark than any of the others).

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Hello…
How to get to thw last page of this thread?

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Login tiips in discourse.

If you have problem login, entered right username n pwd, login successful but no logged in panel,
Try clear your cache and cookies.
This happened because you have cookies and cache from the previous forum engine.
Beware that some browser will wipe all cookies and cache.
As alternative, login from different browser.

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Sorry about the Edit spam. Seems that </br> doesn’t always take so there’s a mix of whitespace and html linebreaks. Tried to neaten it up, still not there, feel free to improve upon said and or the content. Feedback is good too @all.

Cheers.

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Hi

About the suggested topics section, I think it should be related to the topic we are reading / posting at that moment, not to the user past history. Wherever I go I keep on getting suggestions about YafaRay topics, some of them very old, because of my activity in this forum, but I am not interested at all on that stuff right now, and I can imagine as a better behavior f.e. that someone asking something about a lighting algorithm getting more suggestions about that particular topic, instead of getting suggestions about his past history on the forum. Am I right?

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I would skip shortcuts in the getting started guide. They are mostly for power-users (who feels comfortable navigating up and down with J and K anyway?), and some of them are not even Discourse shortcuts, but from the browser, like Page Up, Page Down, Home and End.

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How-To: Table of Contents

(So lets try Something found here).

If you want to create a table of contents for the discussion thread it can be done as so:

Source (expand me) 
- [link to first heading](#heading--first-header)
- [link to second heading](#heading--second-header)
- [link to third heading](#heading--third-header)
- [link to fourth heading](#heading--fourth-header)


<h3 id="heading--first-header">First One</h3>
some text

<h3 id="heading--second-header">Second One</h3>
more text

<h3 id="heading--third-header">Third One</h3>
even more text

<h3 id="heading--fourth-header">Fourth One</h3>
ok no more text

Result:

First One

some text

Second One

more text

Third One

even more text

Fourth One

ok no more text

Note that the ID’s don’t only work within one single post but throughout the page, for an example the ToC in the opening post is pointing to the header in the beginning of this very post!

edit, changed it because: Just noticed it works however only if you already have the relevant discussions(replies) loaded/cached, a downside to the dynamic nature of discourse. Since this post falls within posts 11 to 20 its effectively on page 2.

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1 Like
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@bartv @Fweeb

Should this thread perhaps be pinned?

1 Like
20

Great suggestion, done!

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Nice find Felix, thanks for enlightening. You look like you know your way around webdev. Up for giving the wiki a once over, should you find some time and interest that is, and @bartv doesn’t mind?

@Millani Could always split shortcuts off to 1337 land, just found them easier to incorporate via segue / subject. Figured users would choose according to their preferences and gloss over the rest. Might even get some uptake via osmosis / the association? Open to a draft / edit anyway.

Edit: Thanks for the reminder Bart. As soon as you said it the opening paragraph came to mind. Whoops.

1 Like
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Sure thing, everybody can contribute to a wiki!

2 Likes