New forum theme and plugins available

General
1

The recent Discourse update added a new theme called Horizon. You can select it by clicking on your avatar on the upper right, then the person icon at the bottom right, then Preferences > Interface.

The light theme looks kinda like Gmail and the dark theme looks like Discord. The default theme will remain the same.

This update also added a bunch of plugins into the base install. I’ve not enabled any of these except GitHub, which we’ve had since the beginning. I have opinions about some of them, but I’ll leave it to the community to figure out what we want this forum to look like in the long term.

2

Could the recent spam be a result of this update?

3

Hi Jeremy,

thank you for taking care of the forums! Here are some ideas, but I do not have any strong opinions:

  • Calendar plugin + Right sidebar: if enabled, it would allow us to display the Ada Monthly meetup dates and the AEiC conference days. Maybe others, such as FOSDEM, Crate of the Year and Advent of Code.
  • Maybe reactions? That would allow a more refined reaction system than the heart. But it can backfire and cause confusion… So maybe it is not wanted.
  • The solved plugin. With it, users having questions can mark their posts as solved and indicate which one was the answer.

Thank you for taking care of the spam. If you would like me to be a moderator (to deal with spam, not so much with annoying users :sweat_smile:) I can take the position, but I am not proactively asking for it.

Best regards,
Fer

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4

I think the spam was coincidental. Several other forums got hit by the same bots. New signups require moderator approval now. I’ve deputized @kevlar700 to help out with that.

Yes, this one seems like a good idea.

I’m open to it, but I prefer it when people engage in conversation, rather than low effort emotes.

That seems fine.

You are now a moderator.

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5

:face_with_symbols_on_mouth: :double_exclamation_mark:

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6

Could the right-side-block plugin/module be enabled so that everybody can see the upcoming events?

More info on that here Discourse Calendar (and Event) - Plugin - Discourse Meta

Thanks :slight_smile:

7

The right sidebar blocks plugin isn’t in the core install. I tried adding it, but it seems to be broken with the current version of Discourse. They’ve been making a lot of changes related to theme components lately, so I’m not terribly surprised. Based on the Discourse meta forum posts I’ve seen, it might work after a full asset rebuild, but that’s going to require some significant forum downtime.

I’ll take another look at it after the next Discourse update comes out.

1 Like