Anyone has discovered/ build a site as multisite (SSO), would like to see the possibilities for inspiration!

SSO
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Anyone has discovered/ build a site as multisite multisite(SSO), would like to see the possibilities for inspiration!

ideally, multisite is used for multi cities, where people can focus on local news and events; And also has the abilities to discourse some topics across the cities since the users are taking advantage of the internet to work together.

Thank you all in advance.

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I’m working with a client that’s starting a site for local content. We’re not planning multiple sites, but rather using Discourse categories for different cities/regions. A huge problem for new sites is getting critical mass. If you start by dividing into different sites, the odds that any one will succeed drops massively. Better to have one site for everyone and use the tools DIscourse provides to organize content.

If the site is successful, it might make sense to split up into subsites. (Probably won’t happen, but who knows?) Moving categories from one Discourse instance to another isn’t hard. So you don’t need to start off with multiple sites that you might not ever need.

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I started doing some thinking for someone who wanted to have thousands of multisite sites with a single “main” Discourse site as the authentication source for all of them.

It seemed possible, with some work (and much less work if you have no more sites than you’re willing to configure by hand).

Having the same data on multiple sites is complicated (there has been some discussion about doing this with the ActivityPub Plugin), but you could host the everyone-cares stuff on the main site.

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Are you wanting to use DiscourseConnect for SSO? For example, from one identity provider site, authenticate users on multiple Discourse sites with DiscourseConnect? If so, I think it’s technically possible to do this but it’s not the intended use case for DiscourseConnect. The challenge will be to determine which Discourse site an SSO request has originated from. I think this can be done by adding a URL parameter to each Discourse site’s discourse connect url setting. For example:

  • https://example.com/sso?subdomain=foo
  • https://example.com/sso?subdomain=bar

The code on the identity provider site could then redirect SSO requests to the appropriate subdomains: foo.example.com or bar.example.com.

I’m aware of a site that implemented something like this in the past, but I’m not sure if they’re still using that approach.

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