Hi there Discourse looks amazing. Wow! A big change from my old days using phpbb. In the past, admittedly a long time ago now, I’ve had greater success starting new forums by initially seeding some content. A little social proof does wonders for engagement levels! Would love to know whether it is possible to seed a new discourse forum. What I’d like to do is to create say 200 user accounts and roughly 1000 topics and replies before launching. Is it possible to do this without having either 200 email addresses or 200 social accounts? I’d like to add these users from the admin panel and log in to them occasionally to respond to new users. Many thanks Joe

[image] joesed: Certainly not trying to be disingenuous, but I think it’s important to get the ball rolling with some posts. That way, others are more likely to join in. Hey Joe, You’re definitely right about social proof, but creating fake users is questionable practice and I’d strongly recommend against it, for the long term health of your community. There are more ethical ways of doing it (which won’t result in a backlash). If you want some advice around doing things differently, I’m happy to help. Here is further reading.

You can write yourself a script for that using API :wink: [image] Discourse REST API Documentation Integrations Discourse API Please view the Discourse API Documentation site for detailed info: https://docs.discourse.org information_source Authentication API requests must use HTTP header based authentication. Pass your Api-Key and Api-Username as HTTP headers. Authentication via query parameters or request body is not supported (this was removed in April 2020). Please see the example cURL request below. The only API endpoints that continue to support credentials in query parameters are requests to…

[image] joesed: Is it possible to do this without having either 200 email addresses or 200 social accounts? Seems disingenuous, but you can create multiple users with a single email account by using email addresses like this: my.gmail.username@gmail.com my.gmail.username+user1@gmail.com my.gmail.username+joe@gmail.com my.gmail.username+funnyguy@gmail.com my.gmail.username+smartypants@gmail.com my.gmail.username+guyWeHate@gmail.com and so on. Most email systems support this convention. There’s a bulk import feature, so you could create them all in a spreadsheet or whatever. The API is a great took but you might also put the content in some database and write an importer to populate Discourse. See vanilla.rb and vanilla_mysql.db for examples. I just wrote an importer to import an image gallery. I thought it was a bad idea at first, because it would seem like an image gallery would be a good way to display an image gallery. But it turns out that the image gallery in Discourse is pretty freaking great.

Hi Sergiz and Jay Thank you both for these suggestions. I’m not a coder, so I’d probably look at doing things your way Jay. Certainly not trying to be disingenuous, but I think it’s important to get the ball rolling with some posts. That way, others are more likely to join in. Once again, many thanks. Joe

If you already have the 1000 posts and 200 usernames created in some machine-readable format it would probably be worth a few minutes to look at how the API works and/or paying someone to do it for you, but then, I’m a programmer, so I would think that. Or course, I’d rather spend 20 hours writing code than 10 copy-and-pasting, because what if you ever needed to do it again?

Hi @HAWK I think you make a really great point. I read your article and it makes a lot of sense. Developing a community the right way might take a bit longer but I think it will be better in the long run. You have turned me around. I think my thinking is a little 2009. Once again, many thanks Joe

Heh, awesome. Good on you. :slight_smile: [image] joesed: Developing a community the right way might take a bit longer but I think it will be better in the long run. [/quote] Yup! If you want support or resources, I manage a free community about community building here. You’re welcome to join us.

Hi @HAWK Thanks so much for that. I will take you up on that offer to join your community as well if that’s okay. That’s really cool. Thanks! And to everyone else who helped out, much respect. Thank you. Cheers Joe

I don’t think this is possible as the posts section in api doesn’t have user id. Discourse API Docs How to tag response with an user? @pfaffman

I cannot imagine that the API for posts doesn’t include the userid. Perhaps the documentation is wrong. There is a post about reverse engineering the API that might help,

Can you point out the link here? Will check it out!

Seeding a new forum by creating users and content

Product Support

Sergiz August 28, 2016, 10:23pm 2

You can write yourself a script for that using API

Topic		Replies	Views
[PAID GIG] Seeking Discourse Developer for API User Creation and Automated Approval Marketplace	4	245	March 23, 2026
Is it possible to clone all my user accounts into Discourse? Migration rest-api	3	869	July 14, 2022
Automate post creation on Discourse with multiple users Extras	3	461	October 23, 2025
Creating users without passwords via API Product Support	16	1590	September 26, 2021
Is there a way to post as an arbitrary user when creating a new post/topic using the Discourse API? Product Support	8	1293	May 11, 2017

Seeding a new forum by creating users and content

Related topics