Discourse/Help

If you have questions about how to use discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org, just ask in the Site Feedback category (Archived 2018-02-07 at the Wayback Machine) or here in the Discussion page. We improve our documentation based on the feedback received.

If you want to learn more about the project to use Discourse as a developer support channel, check Discourse.

Is Wikimedia Developer Support for you?

"Wikimedia Developer Support" is just a name, don't take it too literal. What matters is that the questions are related to software development, no matter how basic or slightly related they might look like. In case of doubt, post your question anyway.

The following cases are just as welcomed:

• I am a developer but not for Wikimedia.
• I just tinker with... (bots, gadgets, templates...)
• I am a... (designer, tester, sysadmin...)
• I want to learn.

Creating your account

The current pilot in wmflabs.org does not support Wikimedia single user login (SUL). You can sign up via Wikimedia Phabricator or GitHub logins.

Although the migration of users and content to the production server is theoretically possible and we count on it, at this point it is not guaranteed (T184461).

Following topics and handling notifications

Discourse has a collection of features to help users follow the content that is interesting to them. Web and email notifications adapt to regular actions of the users (reading, replying, being mentioned, watching, muting...). For those willing to fine tune their setup to the extreme, Discourse offers many possibilities. Do you want to be notified only when someone mentions you? Do you want to receive an email for every action happening everywhere? Something in between?

Five levels for tracking content

Discourse offers five levels for tracking topics, tags, and categories. Reading a topic entirely or during a certain time will set it to a higher level, and of course replying in a topic too. Users can refine these actions in their Notification preferences. These levels can be set manually through an icon at the right of topic, tag and category pages. The default options depend on the configuration of the site, and they can be changed via user preferences. From less to more:

• Muted: The user will not be notified about changes, and the topic(s) will not appear in their "Latest".
• Normal: The user will be notified when someone mentions them or replies to their post/comment.
• Watching first post (in tags and categories): Normal + the user will be notified about new topics created.
• Tracking: Normal + in tags and categories the user will track all topics + a count of new replies will be shown in lists.
• Watching: Tracking + the user will receive a notification for every comment.

Email and web notifications

Users will get email or web notifications depending on the defaults of the system and their user preferences. In addition to the notifications for new topics and replies mentioned above, they can receive other notifications, configurable:

• Notifications when someone likes their posts or comments.
• A periodical digest featuring the most relevant topics or activity, which will be sent only when the user is not active in the site.
• A "mailing list mode" can be set in user preferences, which will generate emails for every action respecting muted topics, tags, and categories.

RSS feeds

Discourse has RSS feeds all over. If you find a page that looks interesting to track, just add .rss to the URL and chances are that a feed will be available.

Examples:

• Latest (Archived 2020-09-08 at the Wayback Machine): https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/latest.rss (Archived 2018-02-10 at the Wayback Machine)
• Top (Archived 2020-09-08 at the Wayback Machine) (and the parameters of Top can be defined in the Top page): https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/top.rss (Archived 2020-11-28 at the Wayback Machine)
• A category: https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/c/ask-here.rss (Archived 2018-02-13 at the Wayback Machine)
• A tag: https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/tags/authentication.rss

• Public activity by a user: https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/u/samwilson/activity.rss

• Only new topics created by a user: https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/u/samwilson/activity/topics.rss

Missing a feature that others seem to have (aka user trust levels)

Discourse offers more features to users as they hit milestones using the site. This mechanism called user trust levels helps preventing spam as well as overwhelming new users with features that they might not need.

These are the default user trust levels and the basic features they can use:

• New (0): Basic posts.
• Basic (1): Upload images and attachments, edit wiki posts, flag posts, send private messages, add links to user profile.
• Members (2): "Invite others to this topic", private group messages.
• Regular (3): Make own posts wikis, recategorize and rename topics, create tags, flagging posts from TL0 users as spam will hide the post and even silence them if enough regulars flag them.
• Leader (4, must be assigned manually): pin/unpin, close, archive, split/merge any topics, and edit all posts.

Disclaimer: User trust levels can be customized by administrators of a site, and therefore the Wikimedia developer Support site trust levels might differ from the defaults in the future.