I am migrating my support forum to Discourse from a helpdesk (YouTrack).
I would like to use API to do the following:
Pull users (name, username, e-mail) from YouTrack and create similar users in Discourse. Not setting passwords for them!
Send an invitation to all these users to sign up in Discourse, using the same usernames and e-mails (for them to create new passwords).
Pull certain topics, attachments, and comments from YouTrack and create the same in Discourse.
For that, I will need the same users to exist in Discourse so that they could be made authors of topics and comments. This has to be done, no matter whether such users have signed up in Discourse after receiving the invitation, or not.
Problems:
a) The API documentation says that the “password” field is required when creating a user. How can I work around it?
b) What should be the state of such user (created via API, already has some topics under his name, but not yet confirmed, nor password set)?
I would create the users, categories, topics, and posts using an import script rather than the API.
I’m not quite sure how best to email every single user, but one way would be to have the import script leave users activated and allow them to get a summary message emailed to them and see that the summary email includes instructions for accessing the new forum.
I tried to use this script of yours, that seems to be doing the trick, but keep getting an error message:
./create-user 'Test User Four' me@[domain] test4 41 default
Creating user: test4 user test4 created. . . Adding to group 41. . . {"errors":["You supplied invalid parameters to the request: usernames"],"error_type":"invalid_parameters"}
Can’t figure out, what have I done wrong. Also, is it possible not to set group and password here?
I mostly don’t know, but it seems like you have a bogus group number and you’re getting an error? If it’s adding the user then it would seem that it’s not setting a group already.
You could change the script to have it not set a password, I think, but setting a random password that no one knows is pretty much the same thing as no password.
If you need customization and have a budget, I can probably do it later today.
The group number is correct, I took it from /groups.json. Anyway, my current goal is to find out the solution with whatever tools are available. Thank you for your offer and help though!
Hmm. Well, the script definitely needs to be updated to send the API user and key in a header rather than in the URL. While I’m pretty sure that it worked two years ago, it looks like it was written by someone with two years less experience than I have now.
It doesn’t do any error checking to see if the user actually gets created, so that’s something that I’d change if I were to work on it.
It looks like if you don’t have any groups it’ll skip trying to add the user to the group.
Both reasons are true. We wanted to provide support to our customers on a open forum, so that the whole world could see how great we are And YouTrack was not a good tool for that for a few reasons, and the fact that it charges per user is among them.
Our current setup is the following:
Discourse for support, feature requests and discussions. The Contact Us forms on our websites also land there (new topics and “staged” users are created automatically via API)
YouTrack for development - tasks, bugs and other issues
Confluence for general documentation. Some articles, describing specific use cases, are also published on Discourse (manually)
We also tried to use Discourse as our company blog, but later preferred Hashnode.
Thank you, Dmitry. This expeirence will be useful for us.
We are about moving documentation from Confluence. It has weak search function and expensive payments. Youtrack has knowledge base feature with markdown support. Also it has easy import, search function is acceptable. Youtrack is our bugtrack system, and we’ll keep it.
If you can confirm that YT knowledge base is slow in production, we could consider not to use it.
Discourse is used as 3rd level support system. The main function is saving customers’ solutions and sharing best practices. Unfortunately using Discourse for customers is difficult. Because Customer support team use Service desk. Also it’s too hard to create hundred private categories for each customer.
And YouTrack was not a good tool for that for a few reasons, and the fact that it charges per user is among them.