curly asks about custom extensions and plugins on Discourse hosting, particularly for Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with game login credentials and displaying in-game stats via OAuth. awesomerobot explains that official Discourse hosting only allows custom plugins on the Enterprise plan, with code review and potential maintenance fees due to security concerns. However, Discourse Connect is included by default, and external data like in-game stats can be passed through SSO via custom user fields. More details are available in the Discourse Connect documentation.
I am wondering if there are some caveats with the custom extensions or plugins with the Discourse hosting as opposed to self-hosting? Looking to use a single sign on that is tied back to my games login credentials.
For instance, integrating things like this
I am also wondering if it would be able to display some of the in-game stats or amount of tokens the user has in the game if I had a sign sign on (OAuth). (why I want to use this single sign on)
Official Discourse hosting only allows custom plugins on the Enterprise plan, and we have to assess the plugin code and determine whether or not a maintenance fee is required. Plugins can edit backend code, so we have to err on the side of caution when running anything custom on shared infrastructure.
We have a list of official plugins that are included on our hosting here: Plugin directory | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
Discourse Connect is included in all versions of Discourse by default, and if Lexicon uses our API that’s fine on our hosting as long as it’s not causing you to go over pageview limits or running into any API rate limits.
Yes, it’s possible. We have lots of customers that pass data from an external account via SSO into a custom field in Discourse. There’s some more detail in that topic: