Meta: unhelpful suggestions from Discourse UI

There are a couple of suggestions that the Discourse UI gives that I find really unhelpful, and I’ve never once thought “thanks for the suggestion, Discourse, I’ll do that”.

Firstly, the suggestion to direct message another user, when you’ve replied to each other on a thread a few times. It’s a discussion forum! The point is that other people can read and join in.

Secondly, the suggestion not to add a link when it’s already been shared in the same thread.But that defeats the point of hyperlinks! They’re supposed to be easy and convenient ways of getting external information into some text. If the reader has to

It’s no good for the reader to have to go and hunt down the link from another post in the same discussion.

Do other people feel the same way about these suggestions, and if so, is it even possible to disable them?

(Ironically, there’s a third annoying suggestion: as I type this Discourse tells me “Your topic is similar to …” – it really isn’t’!)

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Yes, I’ve had that multiple times and always felt discourse is trying to shame me.

Imagine people would actually do that and stop an argument exchange mid-discussion… that would be confusing for other readers.

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Yes, all of that stuff can be dialled down or turned off by this discourse’s admin. I turned off most of it at https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org eg.

I will bring the request to admins.

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Thanks. I experienced the same again today when I posted my link to my article. It told me that the submission was similar to some previously submitted articles!

@simonmic Can you tell me where the settings are to disable this? I could not find it after looking for 10 minutes.

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@mpickering Sure, it was a while ago but here are my customisations in Admin → All site settings that seem related to calming down Discourse:

  • Suggested topics: 0
  • Share links: email
  • Share quote buttons: email
  • Fixed category positions [on create]: yes
  • Enable markdown typographer: no
  • Show pinned excerpt mobile: no
  • Unsubscribe via email footer: yes
  • Enable welcome banner: no
  • Default email level: never
  • Disable mailing list mode: no
  • Default other skip new user tips: yes
  • Default topics automatic unpin: no
  • Chat enabled: no
  • Cakeday enabled: no
  • Discourse adplugin enabled: no
  • Affiliate enabled: no
  • AI embeddings semantic related topics: 0
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