The discussion revolves around creating dummy users to populate a new Discourse instance with content, particularly for internal company use. mucio wants to mimic real conversations from a chatroom but avoid using their own account. They explore options like using email plus addressing or browser profiles, but these are limited by their company’s Gmail for Business setup. codinghorror suggests creating multiple accounts, while ssvenn proposes creating fake admin users via the console and then downgrading them. HAWK and mucio clarify that impersonating system or Discobot accounts is not possible without being a ‘sysadmin’. JammyDodger adds that users can be created with invalid email addresses and activated manually without email validation. The thread highlights challenges with corporate email restrictions and potential workarounds for content seeding.
We just installed Discourse in our company and started to show it to people. Of course we need content to convince them to move conversations to Discourse, to do this we need to put more content.
My idea was to copy some of the questions I saw today in one of our chatroom to Discourse, but I didn’t want to post them with my user (it will look weird).
Is there a way to create a dummy user, like admin or Discobot, and impersonate it to post questions and answers?
Anyway we are also using Google SSO if this changes anything.
The traditional way to do this is with multiple accounts – use email plus addressing to sign up as multiple users, and you can also use your browser accounts feature to have multiple sets of cookies / identities per browser.
Where are the target conversations? Chat? What software?
Long term we had talked about forwarding long email chains into Discourse, and having it automatically create a topic and stage all the users, but we keep pushing that back. cc @zogstrip
Unfortunately it looks like the + or the . don’t work with gmail for business account. And I cannot get a new account just for testing/pushing Discourse.
Target discussions are currently in HipChat rooms, but of course not all chat messages are needed in Discourse.
You have to grant them admin privileges to successfully create them with fake mail addresses (it doesn’t skip the email validation step for non-admins), then you can go into the admin panel and find them under Users, revoke the admin rights and follow the steps from Impersonating a user
You could create several users with nonsense email addresses and then activate them from their admin/user page. As you don’t actually need to send them an email you also don’t need to validate their email either.
It is possible to impersonate system and Discobot, but you would need to be a ‘sysadmin’ admin for that (ie. you need to have your account email in the DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS section of your app.yml).
