Discord and Discourse - Better Together | Blog

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

@merefield

Can you please elaborate in some detail? What do you mean by “deeper” & “sophisticated” integration?

Sure! I outlined some of these ideas above actually. For example:

@oshyan

I would love to be able to click on their message in Discord, then with a single command generate an invite link to the forum, sending them to the correct category, and ideally even initiate the “New Topic” action after they sign up, and bonus points for copying the actual contents of their message from Discord into the Discourse topic.

But to hopefully outline it generally (and keeping in mind that I realize some of this may be impossible or more difficult than it is worth, this is the idealized vision):

Ability for Admins, Mods, or anyone (depending on permission settings) to instantly create Topics in Discourse from one (or more) messages in Discord with super simple UI, e.g. right-click.

• UI to select Category and tags (optionally) for new Topic
• Multi-select could be used to identify several messages to include
• Basic version could simply create a Topic from System or other Discourse non-person user, with contents of 1 or more Discord messages as a single message beginning a new topic
• Advanced version would ideally match Discord to Discourse users and create a Topic from the first message selected, attributing it to the correct matching user, with the other selected messages as replies, again correctly attributed
• In either case, a message would be posted to Discord like “A conversation here has just been turned into a Discourse topic. Head on over there to continue the discussion if you like! [link].”

Scroll down on this page to “Retroactive Threading” for a good example (both in concept and UI) for what I have in mind:
https://quill.chat/

Stretch goals:

• Another nice feature would be notifying the user(s) who(se) message(s) are being turned into a Discourse topic within Discord, with a link to the new topic
• Allowing user(s) whose messages were selected for topic creation to deny/opt-out would also be nice to have
• Option to automatically invite authors of selected messages to Discourse if they don’t already have an account (or one can’t be found that matches, which could be addressed in signup if they do have an account, just with a different email, etc.)
• Integration with Discord’s existing (newly added) thread hinting behavior where it says (when people Reply to a previous message) “Want to make it easier to follow this conversion of X replies? Start a [thread]” by adding another option e.g. “Start a [thread], or a new [topic] in our forum.”
• Detection of long messages being composed in Discord and then offering the suggestion e.g. “It looks like you’re writing a very long chat message. Do you want to [start a forum topic] instead?”
• In-line, expandable (pop-up, scrollable?) topic views for topics that are linked to a message/Discord thread, i.e. it shows a normal “onebox” type preview, but you can click it to view more of the actual conversation somehow, like in a popup with scroll

The overall goal is to make it easier, if not seamless, for people to start new topics from existing conversations in Discord and continue their more in-depth conversations on a platform where it makes more sense. And ideally to also provide contextual but unobtrusive hints (much as Discord already does) when people might want to continue a conversation on the forums rather than in Discord. I don’t pretend that some of this won’t itself be a bit cumbersome or awkward, but I do think it would be an improvement over what we have.

It remains to be seen how the chat integrated into Discourse itself will look like, as well as how much it will be adopted e.g. for communities that want to have an active real time component as well as forum, vs. those that for example started in Discord, or already have both a strong Discord and forum community. Will the integration be enough to get new community developers to just use Discourse for both real time and forum functions? We’ll see. But the utility of much of what I’ve proposed above might heavily depend on that outcome.

@merefield

Please feel free to submit PRs or consider specifying (& potentially funding) features to grow the plugin.

I’m not a coder, but I do think about funding things frequently. The problem is I have numerous things I want to see added to/improved in Discourse, and certainly not enough money to fund them all. So I prioritize… The Discord integration features are more something of interest for my consulting clients, so I’m hopeful one day I can convince one of them to fund some expansion there.

@spirobel

I wrote a plugin that solves this problem somewhat. At least when it comes to permissions: Here is an introduction of how it works: Sync your Discord roles with your Discourse groups! - YouTube

Yeah, I did come across this at some point, not sure if before or after my post above. It’s helpful, so thank you for that. It only covers part of the “problem”, but it’s definitely a part of a possible solution.

@spirobel

I think a good idea would be to take this and flip it on its head. Instead of pointing people from discord to discourse we could treat the conversations that happen on discord as an asset. Its a giant treasure trove of content that can be used to automatically create threads in discourse.

I agree with you for the most part, but I’m cautious about automated posting/reposting. Cautious but interested in the possibilities, certainly. If it could be rule-based, as you describe, it could be more useful.

@spirobel

We can react to any event that happens on the discord server. So for example we could create discourse threads every time somebody uses a question mark. I think questions and their answers are probably the most valuable low hanging fruit on the discord side that we could pick and put into the discourse fruit basket. This would also widen the funnel into the community because suddenly the most valuable parts of the discord conversations become accessible from the normal web. Discord conversations are not indexed by search engines at the moment, so this could open up a big opportunity.

That’s very interesting! I’m not familiar with the Discord API so I’m not sure what’s possible, but what you describe sounds like it could allow for some useful solutions. Something rule-based, as I mention above, would be a good option to have.

However I still think powerful tools for mods/admins to manually “curate” Discord content might be the most important or useful thing. Certainly it’s what we have the least capability for now, because Integromat (for example) can already essentially do what you’re describing, looking at Discord topics that are posted, searching for particular text (e.g. ?), or even particular reactions (e.g. an emoji react restricted to mods/admins that triggers via Integromat to post only those topics to Discourse) and then create a Discourse topic from that. So while it’d be nice to have that functionality in a native plugin/integration, it feels less exciting as an area of focus for me than what I’ve described above.