My use case involves Discourse instances for local communities in London (I have three instances at the moment and want to branch out further)
Sharing certain discussions between instances would be great!
No doubt a difficult change from a technical point of view (two way syncing, user accounts, security, edge cases etc), but if it worked, it would massively help my forums bring neighbouring local communities together in London. It would also allow me to seed content more easily on new forums.
A couple of ideas (apologies if they are naive from a technical PoV):
Mirrored Categories
- One or more categories on Forum B are configured to “mirror” chosen catgeories of Forum A.
- New topics created on Forum A would be automatically created on Forum B (authored by a staged user unless a user with the same email address already exists).
- Replies to the mirror topic on Forum B would be synced back to the topic on Forum A, and vice versa.
“Live Topic Links” to Discourse Instances
- When a topic is created on Forum A by pasting a URL to a topic on another Discourse instance (Forum B), the user is prompted “would you like to sync replies between this forum and the forum you’re linking to?”
- If the user clicks “yes,” replies to the mirror topic on Forum B would be synced back to the topic on Forum A, and vice versa (if Forum B has “whitelisted” Forum A)