Creating a link to start a new topic with pre-filled information

[Discourse]

This documentation explains how to create a link that starts a new topic in Discourse with pre-filled information.

Required user level: All users

Sometimes you may want to provide users with a link that opens a new topic composer with certain information pre-filled. This can be useful for various use cases including bug report templates, feature requests, or standardized posts.

Constructing the URL

Base URL

To compose a new pre-filled topic with no extra information, you append /new-topic to your site URL, like so:

https://discourse.example.com/new-topic

Clicking on this will open up a blank new topic composer for any logged-in user (if not logged-in, you’ll be prompted to signin/signup before then opening the composer).

Additional Parameters

While a link to open a blank composer can sometimes be useful, the main strength of this feature is the ability to pre-fill the composer with extra information.

To do this, you can add parameters to the base URL:

https://discourse.example.com/new-topic?title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body&category=category/subcategory&tags=email,planned

This will open a composer window pre-filled with topic title, body, category and tags.

Breaking down the link / URL to show the available options, we have:

• Base URL: https://discourse.example.com/new-topic
• The ? URL operator to add the different options
• Topic title: title=topic%20title
• The &, used each time when including another parameter
• Body: body=topic%20body
• The category and subcategory separated by a slash / if you want to include them: category=category/subcategory
• The tags separated by comma(s) , if you want to include multiple tags: tags=email,planned

Each of the parameters is optional and can be mix and matched depending on your desired end result.

As an alternative to using the category/subcategory name, you can specify a numeric category_id instead, like:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-topic?title=topic%20title&category_id=3

Example

You can try this here on Meta:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-topic?title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body&category=support/wordpress&tags=wordpress

https://meta.discourse.org/new-topic?title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body&category=support/wordpress&tags=wordpress

Though please don’t actually create the topic For a more hands-on explore of the feature use our demo site, try.discourse.org

Using a pre-filled URL with Featured Links

This feature also supports Featured Links, provided that the body parameter is not also included.

The URL must be URL encoded for the link to work.

For example, to create a topic with the following URL https://www.xkcd.com/556, the link will be:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-topic?title=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.xkcd.com%2F556

Best Practices

• w3Schools HTML URL Encoding Reference is a good resource to find what text characters are encoded as in the URL. If you have a lot of text to add, there is also a text-to-URL converter in the ‘Try It Yourself’ section.
• Always URL encode the parameters to avoid issues with special characters.
• If you’re unsure about the category ID, you can check it by looking at the number in the category URL. (eg. https://meta.discourse.org/c/documentation/using-discourse/126)
• Test the pre-filled links to ensure they work as expected.

It is not currently possibly to have a pre-filled link that opens a composer to reply to a specific topic.

Additional Resources

• Creating pre-filled personal message links

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-07-01T19:32:25Z

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