While checking under Setting for the forum I ran a search for ‘google’ and it threw up 29 instances. There were js… files and other such. So wanted to check with the Discourse folks what it was all about. They deleted my topic the first time!! So I raised it again! This time one of their founders replied and said it was just copy text and is a non relevant topic for anyone and closed the topic. It will delete in 14 hours. Check it out while it lasts… 
https://meta.discourse.org/t/too-many-google-references-or-js/116166
So what do you think? Is it important or can we ignore it?
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I think he does not explain well, what does copy text mean, and why is it there if it does not do anything.
I wanted to ask that but by then the topic was closed! He is desperate to prevent discussion on the topic.
I think we should seek a better answer. If they just keep closing topics I’ll raise this in the Fairphone-, F-Droid-, Privacytools- and Humane-Tech-Forums. I’m sure lots of people there will want answers from Discourse and they can’t ignore all of us.
I raised this question twice within 24 hours and they have closed both the topics! Gaël has tweeted about this here but there is no response from Discourse. Yes you are right, we have to raise this where ever possible and demand an answer.
Could you post the screenshots again, so I can forward them to private topics in the other forums?
Okay, so NicoAlt from the F-Droid team put things into perspective (here):
On the images you posted it says:
You can customize any of the text on your forum. Please start by searching below:
Therefore, all these results are just pieces of texts (so called strings) that contain Google in them. They aren’t active connection to any of Google servers.
There are indeed functionalities inside Discourse that lead to connections to Google. But from what I can see, they only happen when you expect them to happen. For example, it’s possible to make login from Google possible. That’s also what the first entry is about,
google_oauth2(OAuth is an open authentication standard). Another result is about adding things to Google Calendar, which will redirect you to their page if you click a button like that. Another one is about Google Chrome, which is displayed in the “suspicious login” view which is only visible for admins and which shows logins of admins that come from other places than where they usually login.A more interesting approach to find out whether Discourse is “calling home” to Google is to search in its code at GitLab for things like “google.com”: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/search?q=google.com&unscoped_q=google.com
Note that this is most likeyl only possible if you’re logged into GitHub (for reasons of DDoS).
I guess technically you could say that was basically what Jeff Artwood was trying to say with:
No, these are copy, text.
only who would understand that? Also I don’t see a reason to hide the topic in the Discourse forum.
PS: Should we move this topic to the public part of the forum too?
I guessed that much that is was customizable. The point is if it the answer was so simple then why was the topic deleted twice!! After all Discourse is a site for discussions right!
Also check out the code snippet on the click of the button. It has the google url and id is google-search. The whole thing is google centric. A user will have to get into the code and make these changes.
<h3>Search with Google</h3>
<p>
<form action='//google.com/search' id='google-search' onsubmit="document.getElementById('google-query').value = 'site:' + window.location.host + ' ' + document.getElementById('user-query').value; return true;">
<input type="text" id='user-query' value="">
<input type='hidden' id='google-query' name="q">
<button class="btn btn-primary">Google</button>
</form>
</p>
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