EDIT: Some of the features demonstrated here no longer apply. However, this is a wiki post, meaning anyone can correct or update it.
This topic is meant to give tips and tricks on useful hidden features of the Discourse implementation of this forum to have a better experience when exploring the website and posting in it. Feel free to add your tips (please focus on hidden features!)
Contents
Browsing
Keyboard shortcuts
Discourse is full of keyboard shortcuts, some of which can improve your experience when browsing it. To Find them simply hit “?” anywhere (except when you’re typing text like I am)
Topic sorting
- by default, topics within a category are listed by date of latest post in the topic, but you may want to sort them by date of the topic’s creation. To do that, you need to add this at the end of a url:
?order=created
For example:
https://blenderartists.org/c/artwork/finished-projects?order=created - you can do the same sorting with topics within a tag but the url structure is different:
https://blenderartists.org/latest?order=created&tags=featured
Topic listing
It’s a bit hidden but you can list all your tracked, watched or muted topics. Go in your Preferences, then in Categories and you’ll find “Show watched topics” and so on. Don’t ask me why they put it there, I don’t get it either:
Posting
Text formatting
in case you’re unaware, the text formatting and layout tool for this forum is a little language called Markdown. Learn how to use it with this cheatsheet.
Multiple images
When you have multiple images to show off, instead of adding full-size images one below the other, thus constraining us to scroll down through them, it may be better to put them in a condensed gallery of thumbnails that we can enlarge and navigate through with the ⇽ arrow keys ⇾. The motion is much less distracting.
How do you do that?
First, an example:
Click on any thumbnail and use the arrow keys to navigate between them:
Now, how to do it:
First off, your images have to be either above 690px in width or above 500px in height. The thumbnail generator doesn’t take smaller images into account and if no thumbnail is generated, the image only shows in the post (not in the slideshow, which may make people skip and miss that image). If your image happens to be smaller, you can enlarge it in Gimp or whatever to make it big enough to have a thumbnail generated, which I did for the first image of this demo gallery.
Now, that warning aside, here’s the text structure of the above mini-gallery:
![San Agustin\|166x180][1] ![Ramses 2\|288x180][2] ![Monument\|180x180][3] ![Moaï\|288x180][4] ![Bayon temple\|271x180][5]
[1]: upload://bRMXQ9bK5wUrX1UXUpYJ2rC7oco.jpg
[2]: upload://3iEktUW51jTb4h3bQh73VRtM3g4.jpg
[3]: upload://4h9y5NA8mTnlkeHpOP2xEArirPB.jpg
[4]: upload://icDRdwwiwP7yGzIQNRNG9R8pLTN.jpg
[5]: upload://c0X0waqMVcw3W989DqQrvfZQKHe.jpg
The main thing to note apart from the classic Markdown formatting is that you can specify the thumbnail dimensions that you want (ain’t that cool?) after the “|” within the [brackets] in the first line of code.
Be sure to respect the aspect ratio of the original image to prevent distortion. In my case I used my calculator to make sure they all have the same height to align properly.
Remember you don’t have to upload thumbnails, they are generated automatically!
: if you encounter issues with the thumbnail generator or slideshow, have a look at this Discourse Meta topic. There are still a few bugs and weird features with extreme aspect ratios.