Python Discourse Quick Start

Welcome to Discourse!
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Python Discourse Help

  • About
  • FAQ
  • Keyboard Shortcuts
    • Found in top right “hamburger” menu or press ?
  • How do I bookmark a message?
    • If one clicks the … icon below a message, it is replaced by a flag :white_flag: and bookmark icons. (The latter looks like a hanging banner, but represents the exposed end of a fabric bookmark.) (Silly to have to do this, but that is another topic.) In any case, click your profile image and the left of the three icons underneath is the bookmark icon. Click that you there is a list of bookmarked messages, with an unbookmark button for each. I am going to like this. I can bookmark messages I might want to respond to after reading the rest of the messages. Attribution: Terry Reedy
  • How do I make Discourse more like a mailing list?
    • Log into your account, go into preferences, enable Mailing List Mode.
  • How do I search?
    • Discourse is perfectly searchable using Google in exactly the same way as Mailman archives. It also has built in search.
  • What are the trust levels?
    • Regular users start at trust level 0. Committers are at trust level 3. There is only one more level and this is for moderators and admins of the instance. This models what we had on the mailing lists, what we have on GitHub, and so on.
  • Can I set push vs. pull parameters?
    • Discourse can be configured to be push or pull based on a personal level. Not only on a personal level, but you can control at the category (similar to different lists), tag, or individual topic level.
  • Where are the settings to reply and create a new topic?

Discourse Basics

What is Discourse?

How do I post code snippets, error messages etc?

Because Discourse uses Markdown to format messages your code would get mangled to an unusable shape if you do not mark it correctly.

Put longer code (one or more whole lines), error tracebacks, data structures etc. between two lines with triple backticks:

```
Here put the text which should be displayed verbatim.
```

Put shorter code (variables, expressions…) in your text between single backticks: `my_variable`

Footnotes

Add footnotes [1] like this:

A sentence that needs a footnote. ^[The footnote] 
Another sentence that needs a footnote. ^[The second footnote]

Discourse demonstration sandbox

The Demo Sandbox is a place to try out Discourse and its features. Each day the sandbox is wiped clean. This is a good place to experiment.

How are other communities using Discourse?

Note: many of these responses have been posted by other devs. Thanks @dstufft for many tips

  1. like this ↩︎

20 Likes
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Or just press ?

6 Likes
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Thanks. Added to original post.

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I’ve made this post a wiki (I think). Would one of the admins be able to pin the first post? Thanks.

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@willingc, I added a link to the Julia forum, as a relevant example of other communities using Discourse.

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Thank you for this helpful miniguide, Carol.

Can you add a section on how to send direct messages to a user? I’m in Japan for a project and would like to contact another user who mentioned that he’s in Japan.

EDIT: I see that messaging is enabled based on a user’s trust level. The Message button popped up on other user’s profile information after I noodled around on the site for a while, posting a few times, editing the posts, etc. So my request here is to add a note about when Messaging is enabled. That would have saved me a lot of time and head scratching. When discobot messaged me, it was doubly obvious that discuss.python.org includes this obvious function but I saw absolutely no evidence of how to invoke it. And then #POOF!#, it appeared out of nowhere.

-Leland