Just a note that a discourse update caused some problems for the openwrt forum.
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I guess the starting point question is: How do you even find out what version of Discourse a site is running? (Tools / Browser Tools / Page Source works but that is a bit of a crappy answer.)
So what version are we running? (My suggestion: 3.2.0) and what version is the OpenWrt forum running?
A later version than here (e.g. 3.5.0) includes a WYSIWYG editor for the new-post window - but on a per-user basis the user can turn that off and revert to the old (i.e. current here) behaviour. And said editor definitely has some gremlins - so a user may well want to turn it off. Is that what they are complaining about?
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All good questions, but I barely know how to stumble my way around discourse and suffered the last time there was an update here. I assumed they were complaining about changes in markup when composing posts.
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If you use the WYSIWYG editor then you no longer have to do (basic) markup - because the markup (e.g. markdown) gets done for you. However there definitely are gremlins with it. Easy workaround … use the user control to turn off the WYSIWYG editor. Then it should work as it does today. Not better. Not worse.
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Answering my own question: You don’t.
I could find evidence of Discourse users requesting this feature going back 9 years. But, as seems to be a pattern, the Discourse team is very stubborn / very inflexible. Once they have decided that the current situation is the current situation, “no correspondence will be entered into”.
So the illogical workaround that I give above appears to be the only answer.
(The reason I use the word “illogical” is that, seemingly, part of the justification for not providing the version is “security through obscurity”. Script kiddies will scan the internet looking for vulnerable, unpatched versions - if a vulnerability were to emerge. But logically therefore you wouldn’t provide the version anywhere on the web, rather than providing it in a place and format that will be easier for script kiddies and harder for a legitimate user.)
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Even for an admin with full access this seems to be hard. I’m trying to do the discourse update now, I can’t even just get a clone working, they have their custom scripts to manage docker and database upgrade seems broken. I’m trying to figure out what is wrong.
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Say what now? I don’t think @j_s was suggesting that you upgrade. If anything the OP might have been implying not to upgrade. However that doesn’t impinge upon the difficulty of the actual upgrade process or any technical problems that might arise therein.
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We cannot stay on the old version forever anyway, so I have to fix the db upgrade issues anyway.
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I tried to be careful in my wording since I’m not competent to weigh in on which way to go, but the linked thread definitely makes me apprehensive. I’m beginning to regret making the OP, especially if the update arbitrarily decides that it doesn’t “support” my browser.
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Depends what your choice of browser is. I can tell you for a fact that Firefox on Linux works fine with Discourse 3.5.0 (and that’s with a lot of privacy-friendly / BigTech-unfriendly / SurveillanceCapitalism-unfriendly settings). I can test Brave or Chromium too if you want that.
While there are gremlins with the new WYSIWYG editor, it is my guess that they are not browser-dependent but just limitations in what has been coded so far in the editor (because, for example, vanilla-as-vanilla Windows users are complaining too).
With the disclaimer that I don’t know which version of Discourse @praveen.arimbrathodi was attempting to get to.
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I have manually upgraded postgresql from 13 to 15 (took an sql dump, upgraded postgres and restored it). This is now available for testing at https://forums-staging.puri.sm and on version 3.5.0 (we switched to stable from default test-passed). Give it a try and let me know if you see any issues. If the new version is satisfactory, we can update production later.
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If we don’t see any blockers I will update on 26th at 6am UTC.
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If possible, see also if the spam defences can be set to “zap”, to prevent what’s been happening. Apparently there are some extensions, according to: Anyone else currently undergoing mass spam attack? - Support - Discourse Meta (and possibly others).
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Just copying in some known problems with the WYSIWYG editor in this version …
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HTML named entities don’t work properly (during editing) any more.
With the old style markup window + preview window, you could type an HTML named entity in the markup window and it would show in the preview window, so you would know whether you typed the name correctly.
With the new WYSIWYG editor, the behaviour is anti-WYSIWYG. You only see that you got it wrong after submitting.
Workaround is to use Unicode character numbers with Ctrl+Shift+U. Highly user-friendly. /s -
I haven’t worked out how to get superscripts (and presumably subscripts) to work in any sane way yet.
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More advanced options with links seem more cumbersome than before.
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