Forum tips & tricks

Discourse has a few nice features that you should know of

  • Write @username anywhere in a post. The user ‘username’ will get notified.
  • At the top right of every post is “Reply as new topic”. Use this to continue a a discussion (a sidetrack) as a new thread.
  • If you select some text in a post a button shows up that lets you quote that text in a reply
  • When you see “in reply to username” at the top of a post it means that the user didn’t reply to the last post in the thread. To see the post that was replied to simply click the “in reply to username” button.

Feel free to add your own tips and tricks to this thread.

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It might not be entirely clear what shows up under “New” and “Unread”. First of all, see this setting that every topic has:

So, for example, if you create a topic, Discourse will automatically set it to “watching” for you. If you reply in a topic it will set it to “tracking”. There are additional settings in your preferences, you can for example choose to automatically watch or track topics in a certain category. You can choose to automatically track topics you enter or have read for a certain amount of time.

The New tab shows all new topics since your last visit (see your preferences for what is considered new). The Unread tab shows topics that you are watching or tracking that have unread posts.

There are around 20 users on the forum now that have reached trust level 3. You should all be able to rename or change the category of any topic. Feel free to do this if you find a topic has a crappy title or was put in the wrong category! (I trust you to do this in a responsible manner of course)

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@David Is there a stats page, or better a graph of membership over time, activity etc, or can you post a few numbers now and again?

I wish there was a public statistics page or something. I’ll look into posting something regularly… here are some current numbers from that I can see in the admin section.

No worries, just post your password :wink:

Forget to say thanks. Interesting numbers. Quite a vocal lot huh! Hope you aren’t regretting setting this up :slight_smile:

Adding some guidelines here. If you change the category or significantly change the title of a post please make a short post explaining what you did (“I moved this from Strategy to Off-topic because [reason]”). If there is any controversy regarding the change we’ll move that discussion to Meta.

Don’t be afraid to make the changes though - let’s just be transparent about what’s happening.

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