It is starting to dawn on me that in order to use discourse to comment on WP posts, these posts have to be published on discourse…
I’d like to suggest that this could be made more explicit in the plugin. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think this simple fact is stated anywhere, probably because it probably seems so incredibly obvious if you’re already familiar with how discourse works.
Okay, you will point out to me that it says “Use Discourse to comment on Discourse published posts” in my screenshot above and I admit to having missed this important detail. But my point is: the fact that it is absolutely not possible to comment on non-discourse published posts remains implicit.
I guess two other misunderstanding of mine reinforced my belief in this being possible:
1.) since Discourse / the WP-Discourse plugin are being “advertised” as an alternative to Disqus and the like, I assumed that it would work in a similar way: instead of the WP comment box there would be a discourse comment box under each post and if someone comments, it will be pushed into the forum.
2.) I misinterpreted the other comments-settings in WP-discourse (“min number of replies” etc) as pertaining to pushing comments from wordpress to the forum, not the other way around. I know, I might have been a bit stupid here, but to my defense I would argue that since this is a WP plugin the settings should be talking to a WP admin and for a WP admin, comments are comments that someone left on the WP site. Maybe it’s just me, but my impression is that the plugin is designed from the perspective of a discourse user who now wants to use discourse in WP rather than from the perspective of a WP user who is looking for a solution for handling comments on the WP site.
Just my 2 cents.