Discourse

Mentors: Student: David Taylor

<p>In our increasingly connected world, full of social media and internet-connected devices, it is important for systems to be interlinked to provide the best user experience. Providing links between Discourse’s ‘long format’ discussion and instant-messaging applications is a natural way to promote real-time engagement with users. The discourse-slack plugin implements this well, and extending this functionality to more providers can only increase user engagement. This needs to be done in a maintainable way and creating a ‘common event system’ for chatroom plugins is the best way to do this.</p>

Mentors: Student: Erick Guan

<p>I will improve Unicode/i18n for Discourse, especially a Unicode username feature. This includes a new gem to leverage on battle-tested ICU library and a so called \emph{i18n backend}. The Unicode/i18n problem has already being handled by Rails but there are also limitation without improvement over years. Leveraging on Rails is not enough.</p> <p>I'll also improve the CJK search. That includes a set of plugins for PostgreSQL so that the index quality can be further improved. Along with the refactors with search module, Discourse search for CJK forum should be improved.</p>

Mentors: Student: Bianca Nenciu

<p>This project is meant to improve the core of Discourse and implement new plugins. The features that are going to be implemented are:</p> <ul> <li>PLUGIN: Convert GIFs to MP4/WebP</li> <li>CORE: General improvements to user’s profile and SSO</li> <li>PLUGIN: Topic list tabs for user-customizeable saved filters As a stretch goal, I decided to work on:</li> <li>CORE: Tracking signups from referral</li> <li>PLUGIN: Passwordless signin via email link</li> </ul> <p>These features should improve considerably users' experience and make it an even better forum software.</p>

Mentors: Student: Jakub Macina

<p>The project proposes new filters to advanced search and extraction of the rake task for running unit tests into a separate gem. Advanced search enhancements contains 1) searching posts containing all of the entered tags and 2) searching posts with images (with extension for searching by any filetype). The benefit for the Discourse community is better filtering of posts with emphasis on the search performance which will be useful for searching in bigger forums. By extracting custom way of running unit tests into a gem, we separate concerns as the tests running library is not dependent on the Discourse, Discourse code base gets smaller and it will be beneficial to whole Rails community.</p>

Mentors: Student: André Pereira

<ol> <li><p>Some topics, like a call-for-bug-reports or a new Howto, will receive a lot of replies that go stale shortly thereafter because the appropriate fixes/edits were applied as a response. When closing or marking as solved doesn't make sense, the best solution to date is to delete these replies. Topic summaries offer a less destructive solution.</p> </li> <li><p>A simple way for moderators to insert pre-written responses to common inquiries. Reduces repetitive actions, especially in support-centric communities.</p> </li> <li><p>See who - apart from yourself - is using the "Reply" dialog box to write a reply to a particular topic. Targeted primarily at private group messages.</p> </li> </ol>