I’m currently building an onboarding bot using the api, private messages and webhooks. The bot will interview new users and publish the interview afterwards for the community to read and get to know the newbie this way. Would it be possible to implement a webhook that gets triggered by personal messages only? Since pms can’t be tagged, I currently need to trigger a webhook whenever any topic is created and changed - which reduces my „trigger budget“ of the bot saas rapidly. Thanks for your feedback!
AI-generated summary
In a discussion about building an onboarding bot using Discourse’s API, private messages, and webhooks, Krischan seeks a way to trigger webhooks specifically for private messages to avoid exhausting webhook quotas. tobiaseigen clarifies that private messages can be tagged via an admin setting and shares a method for tagging PMs via the API. Krischan confirms success using this approach, describing a workflow where user creation triggers a Zapier filter, which then activates a bot on flowxo.com to conduct interviews via Google Sheets, store progress, and compile responses into a wiki post. After user approval, the post is published publicly with a profile link and a badge. After one day of testing, Krischan reports promising results, hinting at potential plugin development.
The onboarding bot you are creating is cool! Please let us know how it goes and share if you can.
Not sure about the rest of your request, but this is not true. You can allow staff to tag PMs via an admin setting.
Also I have a bulk pm method I use to send PMs via the API, and it is possible to add tags.
Thanks, I got it working this way!
Would love to share, but I guess it’s not practicable to replicate since I’m not a coder, but a terrible hacker. 
I let Discourse fire a webhook for a user event, then use Zapier to filter for a user creation event
Then I trigger another webhook, this time in Zapier to get the Bot saas flowxo.com going which asks a Google spreadsheet for the messages to send to the user and stores the progress in another spreadsheet. Your hint helped to get rid off Zapier for the rest of the interview process.
In the end Flowxo puts all questions and answers in one string, posts it in the thread and turns the post into a wiki, so that the user can make final changes. If he then answers with “ready”, the wiki post gets replicated in a public thread together with a link to the profile of the new user. He gets a nice badge and that’s it.
We will test this next week with quite a few users who are on our “waiting list”. I will report back, if the conversion is good. Maybe it’s worth becoming a plugin…
