Anyway to make Forms in Discourse - One Category?

I’ve searched, but can’t seem to find anything on this in this forum, perhaps I’m searching on the wrong key word.

I have a healthcare forum and I am interested in potentially adding another category in the forum for something like “Adverse Events” - where people can report on situations where they’ve had an adverse event with a medicine, etc. The goal would be for a pre-created form to come up as the entry box for this specific category of post. At a minimum this would include some basic text/questions and some freeform text boxes where people can enter information. A more ideal version would be something that could incorporate some drop down boxes, multiple choice, etc.

Is there any plugin or something that does this already that someone might have created?

Below is a rough example of the type of form / information that I’d be looking at recreating in the forum.

2 Likes

A search through #plugins didn’t show many results for forms directly.

In your category settings, you can create “Topic Templates” which will autofill new posts made in that category with pre-determined text. A good example of this is to draft a topic in support and watch text appear in the box.

You might could create the form in that template field, then have form responses be made under that specific category, to which users can fill in the blanks and submit.

The only issue with this is that responses will be public. You can unlist posts, which will make them only viewable to the creator, admins, and anyone with the link. I did a quick search and @theblazehen was able to make a cron job that automatically unlists posts in a specific category:

You could remove the and closed = TRUE part to make it unlist all posts in the category. Make sure to change the category ID as yours won’t be 19.


Someone probably has a better suggestion, or even a full-on plugin for this, but I can’t think of any other suggestions that aren’t external.

3 Likes

Interesting idea. That might be a work around if nothing else is available. The goal is to make this information public - so thats not an issue.

Thanks!

2 Likes

Even better! All you’ll need to do then is make the template.

1 Like

I think this plugin is close to what you want.

3 Likes

It would probably be easier to just use Google Forms. They work nicely with Discourse.

6 Likes

Yes, the Custom Wizard Plugin supports this kind of use case. It’s actually used by other health related forums for a similar purpose.

It’s not possible to use Google Forms for this. Unless you either only had login via google (plus some custom code) or somehow imported all of your user details into a google spreadsheet.

4 Likes

Angus - Fantastic! Can you point me towards any forums that use it so I can see it in action?

1 Like

I wouldn’t “hide” health related info behind a link that is so easy to guess.

It’s better to use the private replies plugin for that.

(Although it’s even better to use the Custom Wizard for the entire purpose).

3 Likes

Yup, you can see it in action on three wizards on thepavilion.io:

  1. The welcome wizard after you sign up
  2. The bug report wizard
  3. The feature request wizard

Note that you need an account to use the wizards.

There’s documentation for the plugin here:

2 Likes

Note that the custom wizard plugin isn’t available on our hosted plans though @BCHK

1 Like

No problem. This is for a different forum I am thinking of starting.

2 Likes

Check Introducing Experimental Form Templates

1 Like