Hey all, hoping someone can help me figure this out. I’ve been running my forum for a while now and genuinely enjoy the platform, so this comes from a place of wanting to see it get even better.

I can’t seem to activate this feature in testing anymore:

I’ve tried replying to old topics (2+ years old) on my forum and here on Meta. No popup appears.

I actually spent time customizing that text. The default wording felt too discouraging, so I rewrote it to encourage replying when someone had something genuinely new or additional to add. That custom text is now gone. it seems.

This is part of a pattern I keep running into. I’ll invest time configuring something to fit the community I’m building, and then it quietly disappears in an update. No heads-up, no deprecation notice, just gone. The removal of bumping when editing your own post is another recent example: Returning bumping after editing last post - #12 by haydenjames

I get that Discourse evolves and not every change can have a long runway, but for settings that admins have actively customized, it would go a long way to surface those changes in the “What’s New” section of the admin panel. Even a short note like “this setting has been removed” would give us a chance to adapt rather than just discovering it’s missing.

I understand there are GitHub discussions and release notes, but from an admin perspective, it would help to have clearer visibility or some form of notice when changes affect existing configurations or remove customizable behavior. A stable product should be just that.

Is there any way to restore or replicate the old topic reply encouragement custom text I had? And if not, is there a recommended alternative?

Edit:

Apologies, I didn’t have my coffee yet. lol For me, Discourse is genuinely the best forum software ever created! It revived a format that most people had written off and made it feel modern again. Its high rate of adoption online is proof of that.

But, it’s also at times, like that girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is and keeps adding makeup she doesn’t need. Discourse is already beautiful! It doesn’t need much +/- to stay relevant as long as the need for this type of peer-to-peer interaction stays relevant online.

Someone recently wrote about Xfce (Linux desktop UI) being ‘the most boring desktop environment’ as the highest praise: Xfce, the Most Boring Desktop Environment . Same energy. It just works, stays out of your way, and lets you do what you came to do. I’d just love to see that well-deserved decade-under-the-belt confidence from this brilliant software.

Updates > Changes