Jan 6: A new version 1.7 of the Discourse forum software will be released soon. I will post some highlights this weekend. For those interested in what is coming up, you can read an exhaustive list of features here.
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Jan 15: The new version has landed, and here are just a few highlights that you can easily spot
On the latest posts page, youâll see a line that shows you what happened since your last visit, a nice visual aid
The categories page has been revamped and now has a sidebar that brings the latest posts/topics. It is thus a more useful hybrid page
Some more highlights
- Improved navigation on mobile devices (especially moving back and forth, scrolling down)
- More links pasted into posts will now automatically expand into a preview box (âoneboxâ) and you can start a post with a link (Just paste a link into the title field and see what happens)
- Email summaries (usually sent at the end of the day or week, depending on your setting) were redesigned and are even more useful now
- Advanced search as gotten some useful updates
- Tons of security, performance and UI fixes
- see official blog post and release notes
Nice to see the software we use here evolve every six months to become even more useful. I love posting in the forums from my mobile phone, it just works really well
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The new version of Discourse 1.8 will come very soon, for those interested in finding out what will be available soon, please read
or the full release notes at Discourse Version 1.8 - releases - Discourse Meta
I will let you know once weâre rolling live with the update
The update is now live. Let us know if you experience any problems. Two of you were awarded user of the month badges already 
The new year will start with the 1.9 upgrade to Discourse, bringing a number of interesting improvements to the forum software. Stay tuned
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It will probably arrive in the next days/weeks, and it brings a whole lot of smaller and larger upgrades to the forum, if youâre into the nitty gritty techy stuff you can check it out here Discourse Version 1.9 - releases - Discourse Meta
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This forum now uses Discourse 1.9, which brings the improvements linked to above, some of which are neatly explained here:
We have made some minor changes to our privacy policy, however some more work still needs to be done. In short: nothing changes, most aspects were made very clear before.
Privacy at the SWDb forums in a nutshell:
- we use Google Analytics
- we may use Google Adsense
- Embedded media (e.g. YouTube) is like visiting those pages
- we donât pass on your personal data to third parties
- your data is transmitted via an https connection
- Weâll export and/or delete the data we have on you at your request
etc. Stay tuned and contact us if you have any questions.
Discourse 2.0 is coming shortly to this forum⌠for those interested, the following link provides some detail about whatâs coming:
We are now running Discourse 2.0, enjoy!
Forum upgraded to Discourse 2.1 / to read more about what this brings for you, read the below article by the makers of Discourse:
So weâre now on 2.2, which brings a lot of under-the-hood updates (it also broke a few things, images mostly, some things are still being fixed while youâre reading this)⌠for those interested in what it is, their product blog has the details:
On the top right corner of the screen, next to your user icon, I also updated some of the essential quick-access icons.
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Stumbled across a massive (actually tiny) problem with the forum that turned out to be the reason most folks donât even get email notifications from the SWDb forum (including password reset emails and such). This is fixed now and should lead to a lot more folks getting a lot more emails
We do want to remind everyone of the Signpost
It includes a lot of tips and tricks, but also the important links to the community guidelines and FAQ. I am happy to say that the instances where SWDb staff have to moderate or mediate in arguments etc. are very very few, but every now and then we do hear of improper conduct, or situations where forum members engage in less than friendly interaction. We encourage everyone to be adults and keep up the great community spirit that we have. Thank you, and please let me know if there are any specific tips and tricks that should be explained, or any aspects of our community rules that need to be clarified.
Latest version of the forum software now supports
- tabbed user menu interface
- more and cooler emojis
- more flexible URL insertion dialogue in the editor
- polls now have a pie chart option
- splitting and merging topics now gives better control over what is being bumped or marked as read
Tons of other improvements, read more:
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Alright, I love it when the underlying tech that powers this forum makes some bigger steps, and the 2.5 update brings some really neat things. This update has already been applied to this forum. Here are some of the things new for us all to enjoy:
- You will be able to add timed reminders and descriptions to your bookmarks
- Multiple users can be invited at once with an invite link (that you can for example post on social media somewhere)
- The forum will finally support multiple email adreses per account! And user accounts can also be merged more easily.
- The forum will natively support and adapt to your timezone
- Certain posts/topics will be able to transform into static web pages
- Automatic reply deletion (useful in wiki topics, which we dont really use at the moment)
- IE11 support dropped. Get a better browser, folks. Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge⌠etc.
- Tags have permalinks
- Reddit and Facebook videos get proper onebox embeds
And tons more, read the entire announcement by the Discourse team:
I am in the progress of optimizing some things here in the forum, including (but not limited to):
- there are no more sub-categories in the international category of the forum. Instead, we can tag posts with their language
- I am testing an alternative way to implement a newsletter, you might have seen that topic
- I am playing around with an option to let everyone blog right here in the forum, that section will have a slightly different look as well
- Accessing tags is now back on the main horizontal menu
- The two SWDb-related categories of the forum will likely be rolled into one, still looking for a cool SW-sounding name, Sheriffâs Office is a bit too long. Ideas?
- The main, most active members that donât already have accounts for the SWDb, will likely be approached by me for getting thoseâŚ
More to come
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I also managed to assign little flags to them, to make them more visible. This is purely illustrative, of course it would be possible to be very exact with which flag for which language.
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So, there is now only one category left with site related stuff and I will clean that one up a bit so it becomes more helpful. The (hidden) staff room is also in there.
The Newsletter category (our test) is a subsection of the new Magazine category (which is also a test).
The international section now has no more sub categories, so discussions arenât too isolated from each other.
The loung that you didnât know existed because you will need to earn trust level 3 before seeing it, is also still thereâŚ
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