The discussion revolves around integrating Facebook with Discourse, focusing on automating content sharing between the two platforms. dosch initially asks if Facebook Page posts can be automatically mirrored to Discourse and whether replies across both platforms can be synchronized. erlend_sh confirms that one-way automation (Facebook to Discourse or vice versa) is technically feasible using APIs, but warns that two-way sync is highly problematic due to data duplication, loss, and maintenance complexity — citing failed attempts like Social for WordPress. He suggests treating each platform as a separate “clubhouse” for conversation.
dosch asks if they can implement the one-way sync themselves, to which erlend_sh replies affirmatively for developers — but dosch admits lacking technical skills. Later, achamess revives the topic, seeking a WordPress-style plugin for Facebook-to-Discourse posting. jomaxro notes Facebook’s Terms of Service may prohibit plugins designed to export data from Facebook. PackElend laments the lack of progress.
easylocarb proposes the reverse: posting daily Discourse digests to Facebook groups to drive traffic back to Discourse — which codinghorror supports as a promotional tool. justin recommends using Zapier with Discourse’s RSS feeds (e.g., category.rss or tag.rss) to automate posting to Facebook. easylocarb suggests using a dummy Trust Level 0 user to receive daily digests and forward them via Zapier, though it’s not perfectly time-bound. justin offers a refinement: using a specific tag (e.g., fb-post.rss) to trigger Facebook posts — allowing staff or users to opt-in posts for cross-posting. easylocarb embraces this, combining digest-based promotion with user-initiated tagging for targeted sharing.
Hey,
I am curious about two things:
One: Would it be possible to automagically post new Facebook Page posts to a forum in Discourse?
Secondly: could replies to the forum ánd the new Faecbook post would be synchronised, so that a FB users can discuss with a Discourse forum member about the post each on their own platform?
Yeah, that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish by using the Facebook and Discourse APIs. It could easily be made to work the other way around as well, with Discourse posts being automagically posted to Facebook, if you’d rather use Discourse as your primary content outlet.
Two-way sync is incredibly difficult to do right. I’ve seen serious attempts at it before, e.g. Social for WordPress, and it just doesn’t pan out well. It’s always prone to data loss/duplication and immensely difficult to maintain.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong about having conversations happening in a few different places as long as there are enough participants to sustain the exchange in each “club house”. Every social network or forum comes with its own norms of participation, so you might as well treat them as different schools of thought that you are eliciting feedback from.
Thank you!
Do you think that setting up the API’s to do the first thing is something I could do myself right now?
If you’ve got some developer chops, sure!
sadly I don’t…
Guess I’d have to wait for someone else to do this and publish a how-to
So to refresh an old thread, but this is something I’m wondering about. Is there a way to send posts on Facebook to Discourse, the way the wp-discourse plugin sends WP posts to Discourse?
I’m not finding the topic right now, but there was a more recent discussion about this - Facebook’s terms of service prevent a plugin being written on Facebook with the purpose of sending information elsewhere.
Still no change?
No Facebook integration?
I would like to do the opposite; post a digest every day on a FaceBook group of what happened today on the Discourse forum. It would be posting data TO FaceBook so shouldn’t be against their TOS, but the goal would be to give people a link back to discourse in their FB newsfeed.
Sure, that makes sense as a way to advertise a vibrant Discourse community to your Facebook channel. @justin do we have a way of helping to set this up?
I’m guessing the best way is to use a service like Zapier if you want to automate it – you can select a new category to watch via its RSS feed (i.e. https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/2.rss) using Zapier’s RSS feed monitoring tool, then create new Facebook posts for the new topics.
That’s the simplest way I’m aware of right now!
Thanks. Not sure how the new category idea would work. I guess admins would have to manually move popular posts into that category to be zapiered to FB. But it does have potential for having a special FB category where posts are explicitly copied to FB.
I did think of creating a dummy user, locking it to Trust 0, and not logging into it so discourse would mail it a daily digest summary and using Zapier to report that on Facebook groups. The only downside is that it includes a summary since the dummy account last logged on, but otherwise it’s close to what I want - a summary of popular publicly visible (trust 0) posts.
You could use a tag for this — append .rss to the tag URL and use that in Zapier. Then when staff adds the tag to the topic, it’s added to the list. That way you don’t have to move the topics to a specific category.
Oh I like that idea as an addition to my plan.
My primary goal is for the facebook group to regularly broadcast the existence of a vibrant discourse forum (to use @codinghorror’s term) off facebook. The digest mechanism can be leveraged to do that because it collects a summary of the most popular things that have happened in the past day by using zapier to repost digest mails into the facebook group.
But I can also add the ability for a user making a post to request the post to be copied to the facebook group by tagging it with a specific magical tag. And then the .rss feed of that tag can be used to add posts to the facebook group.