Auto Post to Twitter

Feature
1

We have a “news” forum in our site which is great because it allows users and ourselves to quickly post interesting news for discussion. Frequently these get “oneboxed” so the layout is nice. - Its actually a quick and easy alternative to blog postings on our site.

It would be great if we could automatically hook up Discourse with our Twitter accounts so that the title and a shortened link automatically got posted to twitter - to help drive conversations on our forum.

This would only be for news (the initial post) posted to this forum Category, by a Moderator.

This would have broad appeal and help all forums because it would help drive traffic to people’s Discourse Forums - which is one of the key challenges that most Discourse forums will have.

4 Likes
2

We use http://twitterfeed.com/ for this, pointing it at the site’s RSS feed. Works pretty easily.

6 Likes
3

Seems like it might be a reasonable work-around for a while. I’m wondering if it posts just the first post in a discussion, or all of them. I don’t want my twitter account filled with discussions - just the first news item.

4

It only posts new topics, and can add text before and after the topic title. If you look at https://twitter.com/OpenMRS you’ll see some examples. I’d recommend testing with a non-public Twitter account first to make sure it’s working as you expect.

5

Can you point me towards your forum and twitter feed so I can see how you have it working at (PM me if you don’t want it public)?

I’m wondering if you can do this with just one category in our Discourse forum.

6

IFTTT is another (more flexible) option besides twitterfeed: https://ifttt.com/

1 Like
7

We’ve proved to ourselves manually that auto-tweeting new topics is a great driver for new traffic to the forum.

However, getting this working technically without me coding something doesn’t seem possible. Does anyone have a good method of getting this working?

I’ve tried Twitterfeed hooked up the the latest.rss feed but the tweet it generates is not pretty and it’s not really usable.

Would love a pointer to a plugin that can be setup to auto-tweet new topics if such a thing exists? Or a functional alternative that can access all new topics and format the tweets.

Without access to webhooks I guess the only programmatical solution is to generate a new user and use the API to poll /new.json and prevent duplicate posting myself?

8

Can you be more specific? The RSS feed should work for this

1 Like
9

It works but the tweet that comes out looks like this:

https://twitter.com/pc_twittest/status/531771816906211328

Though looking again at twitterfeed I could probably clean that up by just using the title.

Main issues is that I’d like only new topics, but there doesn’t seem to be a public feed for new topics. Can I get a new.rss feed using the API key?

2 Likes
10

Yes - this is exactly the case. This is what I would like too.

11

This is what you want to do. Works great for us.

12

Yep, on re-examining twitterfeed. If you set it to follow http://example.com/latest.rss and only show the title. It seems like this will do the job.

I’m going to set it running for a while and see how it goes.

3 Likes
13

Twitterfeed isn’t very reliable. I’ve repeatedly tried to add a bit.ly account, and kept getting errors. After giving up on that, I tried to just add the latest.rss of my forum. After ~30 seconds, I got “something went wrong” (probably the backend timed out).

Tried again a few minutes later; no luck.

14

I’m curious what other people are using for this in 2024.

I’ve been using dlvr.it for many years, but now they have removed their free plan, and I can’t justify $9/mo.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive, free, or self-hosted alternative for low-volume posting?