Discourse News Aggregator Plugin

Hi all,

I installed the News Plugin on my Discourse-powered community and it’s been awesome after that. And now, I want to take the news a bit further.

Sometime ago here on Meta before I started out my own community (about two or three years ago when I was still at the sidelines watching), there used to be a plugin that collates information/content and/or news from external sites and put them in a category whilst also linking back to those sites. See this as a news aggregator stuff, and I believe it’d be awesome if I can do same for the category where my News Plugin gets its content from.

So my question is this: Is the plugin still available? Tried searching for it but couldn’t get it here on Meta. And if it’s not, can someone look into doing this maybe for free or paid? Just thought it’d be a very good feature to have since the news tab on my community is majorly where many of my new users get to hangout the most, apart from the community programmes and some giveaways.

2 Likes

Are you referring to the rss poster:

https://github.com/LeoMcA/discourse-rss-poster

@LeoMcA would be the only one who could comment on its status, but judging by this issue it’s no longer working:

https://github.com/LeoMcA/discourse-rss-poster/issues/5

Bear in mind that this isn’t really a #support topic, if you want to solicit the skills of a developer you should be posting over in #marketplace with your budget.

6 Likes

Thanks for your response, @Stephen. Would possibly have to try out posting in the marketplace for this and see if someone would be willing to work on this.

In general this is a very risky strategy for a community since (if automated from some external news source) you are basically spamming your forum with auto-generated topics. This will quickly inundate your site with low value topics that have no replies.

The organic community based way to do this is either:

  • Curate the news and post topics based on what you (or a core of power users / editors) think is interesting, whole sites are based on this strategy such as Boing Boing.

or

  • Have an active community that already posts topics, and wait for the community to post topics about interesting news events themselves, or otherwise encourage them to do so
10 Likes

@habeycole Hey there :slight_smile:

If this is the plugin you mean

I’m the author of it. You can post in that topic, or reach out to contact@thepavilion.io if you’d like to extend it.

2 Likes

Hi, thanks for your input.

I thought on the same issue myself and felt it’s best to let the community grow on its own and developing interesting topics that will be featured on our news page, just like you opined.

2 Likes