That’s actually a good point, let me think about it.
No, that should be fine. i think the problem is on our end, I think the search index or something is not working 100%. We just launched it yesterday! @blake, can you look into this?
And from the Contents page? E.g. from:
http://suttacentral.net/dn
it would be nice to be able to browse for suttas that have tagged discussions etc.
Not sure about this. It could overload the page; it might increase loading time a lot, not sure.
On the one hand, it would be nice to have a place that was for discussions about the division as a whole; someone might want to talk about the Nidana Samyutta, for example. On the other hand, maybe we should keep it simple, and just let people search for things like that on Discourse. SC isn’t meant to be an interface for Discourse, we just want to make the connection.
We might let the current implementation settle down and see how the feedback and usage goes before pushing it any further.
Dear Bhante, dear Blake,
just to let you know and in order to link my post with the original conversation: I experienced the same issues as @mikenz66.
Since, you are aware of this issue already, feel free to ignore that post… 
With much mettā,
Robert
A few details for @blake
I’ve tweaked the CSS for the Discourse results. Overall I’ve made it a little more compact and balanced.
Thanks for hiding it in the Templates folder, that gave me a nice little hunt! Just wondering, is there any sane reason why this isn’t in, oh I don’t know, stab in the dark, the CSS folder, perhaps?
For filtering, we still need to narrow results for the exact ID, so MN2 does not grab MN21.
Also, can we exclude results based on category, such as this Dev category, or more generally, the Meta category?
As time goes on we might want to weight results by Likes or something. Currently, how are the results sorted?
Is there a problem with the Discuss & Discover feature? I currently don’t see links from any sutta…
Hmmm, I manually regenerated the search index and the results are back, I’m not sure quite what went wrong though.
In fact it seems to be working instantaneously!
Is there a reason why the Dhammapada verses don’t have this feature?
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Is it possible to make this feature work in the titles?
I notice that in posts like this:
by @Russell I can’t easily get to MN95.
(Whereas having typed it up here ^ I can get to it easily.)
In the links I added I simply copied the title into the body, which then made the sutta labels active, but one could argue that that approach adds clutter.
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I concur with @mikenz66. It’s not easy to link without having to type the ID onto body of the post.
To help out and minimize the trouble for you, would you like posters to type the ID on the body?
with añjali and mettā,
russ
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Thanks @Russell. I think it’s good to clarify the best and/or most efficient way of setting up things so that the site works well.
I agree, the automatic linking should work from the title, hopefully this is possible.
Discuss & Discover and Textual Details options inside the sidebar on a sutta text page aren’t there for any language except English
is this a part of the design?
i’m trying not to dare to presume that their accessibility could be useful for readers of other languages as well
Yes, I think it’s just an oversight
On a related note, would it be OK to post Essays/AV in Chinese, or is it best to keep things in English for now? For example, Chuang Ch’un-chiang 莊春江, many of whose Chinese translations are on suttacentral, has written guided readings of 12 MA suttas and 20 SA suttas.
I suppose in the future one could do something clever with tags so that you can choose whether or not to see Discourse posts in other languages.
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I must say I am thrilled to see this idea take off so well, and to see such interest in it. Our aim is, absolutely, that there should be resources in multiple languages. How that is to happen is something we haven’t considered yet.
There are two distinct issues.
- If we have multiple posts in different languages, how do we keep the results relevant and the discussion focussed?
- How do we moderate discussion in languages that we don’t understand?
There are different ways of approaching this. The simplest would be to introduce a way of posting topics that allowed distinguishing languages. We could include a language tag, for example, maybe assign “English” by default, and if you’re posting in another language you can specify that. Then, on SuttaCentral, your results would be only for the language that you’ve chosen to read suttas in.
This wouldn’t be (all that) hard to implement, but it would pretty much render Discourse useless as an actual forum. At the moment we’re both a forum and a place for posting resources, but if there’s lots of stuff in different languages, conversation will be impossible.
A better option, I think, would be to support people from different language backgrounds to run their own Discourse instance. Once we have our system worked out, we can communicate with those working with the websites in different languages, most of who we know already, and, if they want, set up forums for them. Then they do the moderation, foster conversation, and run the site, while we provide technical support. Posts from the different “official” forums would get pulled on to SuttaCentral, once again, based on the language selected there.
This would get more complicated in terms of things like, how do we organize updates and so on. And of course it relies on finding interested and competent people to help. So it’s something that needs a deal of care and consideration before moving forward, and we need to have the kinks pretty much ironed out here before going ahead.
In any case, these are a couple of approaches that I’ve thought of, probably there are other ways of doing it as well.
TL;DR: We’d love to support different languages on Discourse, but we’re not sure how to do it yet.
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