I’ve started to research Discourse as a general solution and started with embed capabilities. To be frank the whole situation seems to be a bit of a mess.
This thread has many requests based on what makes sense for users, and many replies of implausibility based on limitations of the architecture. This doesn’t sound good – the latter should be informed by the former, especially for what appear to be common or not an edge case scenarios.
Would it be possible to only create the topic when someone publishes a comment?
No, it is a huge change architecture wise. On Discourse you need to post replies on topics. There is no concept of >>“replying to a topic that doesn’t exist yet.”
How could this require a huge change to a well designed architecture? Of course, no design can do everything well nor should it try. However embedding scenarios have existed longer than Discourse has. Even if embedding was not an original goal I’m not sure why the door wouldn’t be left open. Sometimes things change.
Can’t we use an API to help the situation?
No, that would be very insecure. You can’t trust what the client passes to you to create topics.
It’s important that the Discourse instance makes a GET request to a server you have whitelisted as embeddable…
you’ll have to trust me when I say this is not easy to do.
Are you sure the API would have to be very insecure? You’re the expert on your code, but I don’t see a problem in principle here. I guess a big difference would be if you’re talking about existing code limitations vs. what best practices would be in general.
[people wanting to get rid of the “Continue Discussion” limitation]
No, we won’t be doing that – the goal is to drive people to the community site, not be a comment engine for a random webpage.
You know what, I would post that at the top of this thread in a large font because it’s a strategic bet you’re making that everyone should be able to get on board with or not right up font.
I don’t mean to sound disagreeable in this thread and I usually find it quite pleasant to talk with other developers. I must admit feeling a little defensive after reading a few different threads where Robin said something to the effect of “well if you don’t like it maybe you’d be better off with another product”.
Is that technically a true statement? Sure. Does it sound good? I think often it gives the wrong impression. I mean the content adds no value right? If a feature is not going to be implemented, I’d suggest it’s good enough just to say something like “sorry, that’s not on our roadmap at the moment but we appreciate the feedback.”.