I upgraded the forum recently. Here are the highlights:
New style for Category page: Boxes
The boxes style category layout has long been supported for individual categories, we’ve now added support for the boxes layout on the /categories page itself. Choose from “Boxes with Subcategories” or “Boxes with Featured Topics” (pictured below).
Add graphs to your post
The Graphviz plugin allows you to add graphs to your post using the DOT language.
Add a dynamic calendar to your topics
The Discourse calendar plugin allows you to create a dynamic calendar in the first post of a topic. You can add new events by posting a reply with a date using “Insert Date” modal.
Warn before overwriting draft
Ever start editing a post in one tab, leave it open, start editing in another tab, and then find that you overwrote your first edits? I know I have. To help avoid this, Discourse now warns you when edits may overwrite an existing draft.
Share to Discourse (Android)
The Discourse Progressive Web App on Android now supports receiving the native OS “share” feature. For all the details and requirements, see:
Image loading improvements
Instead of loading images for all posts, we only load them when they’re on screen. Images are initially displayed as a 500 byte low-res blurred placeholder, further improving load time and decreasing bandwidth usage.
Consolidate like notifications
Does your site have that one user that likes every single post? The one who causes your notifications to overflow when you wake up in the morning? Good news! Discourse now merges sequential likes from the same user, helping keep your notification history happy. By default, sequential likes will be merged if there are 5 or more, and they happen within 2 hours of each other. This can be configured via the likes_notification_consolidation_threshold and likes_notification_consolidation_window_mins site settings.
New shortcut (g s) to access first suggested topic
Ever opened a topic, read the first post, and realized you don’t need to read the rest? Then find you have to scroll through all the posts to reach the suggested topics at the bottom? We have too. Now you can use the keyboard shortcut of g followed by s to load the first suggested topic from anywhere in the current topic.
Improved image resizing discoverability
When large images are uploaded, Discourse automatically scales them to fit within the post stream. Users can click on the image to view the image full size, and to download it.
Sometimes, users do not want images to take up the full-width of the post stream, so Discourse supports resizing images. To do so users must add ,xx% to the image dimensions. To make this more discoverable, users can now resize images to common percentages (100, 75, & 50%) by hovering over the image preview and selecting the size they want. To make more specific adjustments, users can then edit the raw image markup.
Example:
Via markup, you can also use pixels to resize to a specific width or height.
Example (width at 200px, auto-height):
Example (height at 200px, auto-width, useful especially for multiple same-height images side-by-side):
 
Merge share and invite actions together
Want to share a topic or invite a user? The share and invite actions have been merged to a single modal. Select the “
Share” button from the topic footer to access the share/invite modal. This change also adds support for inviting users on mobile, as topic invites were previously a desktop-only feature.
iPad composer improvements
Unfortunately Apple does not provide support for JavaScript to detect if a hardware keyboard is attached, or if a software keyboard is visible. For this reason, Discourse has to assume there’s a software keyboard visible. For more details, see iPad with external keyboard connected can’t see post when replying , and check out the bug report filed with Apple: 176205 – On webkit ios there is now way for accounting for virtual keyboard height .
However, we’ve continued to make changes to improve Discourse usage on an iPad, despite the limitations. We added a new user preference which allows users to specify that a physical keyboard is connected. We also added support for using Alt + Enter to submit a post, and for focus to be set in the composer textarea .
Allow users to easily track/watch/mute topics via email
- If you reply to an email with the word “mute” a topic will be muted
- If you reply to an email with the word “track” a topic will be tracked
- If you reply to an email with the word “watch” a topic will be watched
These ninja command can help advanced mailing list ex-users, saves a trip to the website.
Other improvements
- Account Security: Show recently used devices, log out of sessions, and disconnect devices.
- Privacy: Disable user presence and profile (this is the feature that let’s us see when others are typing replies)
- Full screen mode for the composer window
- Search design improved to show each type of result: topics/posts, categories/tags, and users.
- New Badge: Wiki Editor
- Edit conflict warning: If two users attempt to edit the same post at the same time, one edit will overwrite the other. A warning is now displayed in the composer to help avoid this.
- Removed the category column from topic lists to streamline it.
- User-selectable font size
- Added user Ignore feature (TL2+) that rolls up into shadow moderator PMs when multiple people ignore the same user.
