Problems I have with the Purism Forums

General
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  1. Forum sets Alerts to Tracking seemingly for reasons unknown. i.e., I didn’t post to topic, just read some posts.

  2. Would like to be able to turn off badges. Not interested in tracking myself.

  3. Nagging about enabling notifications.

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You can go to your Preferences/Notifications here on the Forums and change your settings. Reading can switch the notifications on unless you change the defaults.

Probably also somewhere in settings…

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Found the tracking setting. Thank you! It was what I found most annoying.

No settings to turn off badges or disable notifications about turning on notifications.

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Is this a Discourse thing or just a browser thing, though? I used to see those, but haven’t in a long, long time. I forgot how I disabled them, unfortunately.

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My forum preferences report:

You denied permission for notifications. Allow notifications via your browser settings.

Note: You have to change this setting on every browser you use.

So I think @amarok is onto something.

What browser is the OP using? (I’m using Firefox.)

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My (non-expert) answer.

  1. No, you can’t turn it off, nor can an admin turn it off for you. The forum software (Discourse) does not cater for that.
  2. It can only be turned off on a per-site basis globally for all users.
  3. Go with the flow. The longer you go, the fewer badges you will be hassled about (because you have mostly received all the badges that you are going to receive).

For myself, I can take it or leave it. Don’t care either way.

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Is there a way to download the source code for the forum platform?

I think it’s some variant of Discourse but maybe Purism tweaked it, if so can we get the source code of Purism’s variant that is really used here, to see what is going on? That would then be a way of finding out how the notifications work, for example.

Edit: looks like the Discourse source code license is GPL but not AGPL, I think that means that Purism would be allowed to use a modified version without sharing the modified source code, as long as Purism only runs it on their own servers and are not distributing the modified code to others. I’m not super-good at these licese issues, please right me if I’m wrong.

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This is not true. Have a look at Qubes forums, some users hid their profiles: one. They have a setting in profile “Hide my public profile and presence features”. However it is probably just a security theater, since all posts, likes and so on are public and anyone can count them. Your badges show to others that you can be trusted and contributed to the community.

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Hiding the profile may be different from what the OP is asking for. He doesn’t want to see the notifications relating to his accumulation of badges. I don’t think he cares whether anyone else can see his badges.

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I’m using Firefox. Pretty sure notifications aren’t coming from the browser.

Badges are just something I don’t care about, but I’m not bothered by them. I just think they’re silly and useless. Maybe people use them as indicators of trust/competence, which would make some sense. I usually just look at join dates on forums for that.

Anyway, the tracking was the one that prompted me to make this post, so I’m much happier.

So this is a Dischord based forum instance, I was wondering what was the basis. (Just not enough to dig into it.)

Thanks, everyone! :slight_smile:

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Just played with the notification notice, and it was from my browser. Egg on my face. :frowning:

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