I am curious about two things:
One: Would it be possible to automagically post new Facebook Page posts to a forum in Discourse?
Secondly: could replies to the forum ánd the new Faecbook post would be synchronised, so that a FB users can discuss with a Discourse forum member about the post each on their own platform?
Yeah, that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish by using the Facebook and Discourse APIs. It could easily be made to work the other way around as well, with Discourse posts being automagically posted to Facebook, if you’d rather use Discourse as your primary content outlet.
Two-way sync is incredibly difficult to do right. I’ve seen serious attempts at it before, e.g. Social for WordPress, and it just doesn’t pan out well. It’s always prone to data loss/duplication and immensely difficult to maintain.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong about having conversations happening in a few different places as long as there are enough participants to sustain the exchange in each “club house”. Every social network or forum comes with its own norms of participation, so you might as well treat them as different schools of thought that you are eliciting feedback from.
So to refresh an old thread, but this is something I’m wondering about. Is there a way to send posts on Facebook to Discourse, the way the wp-discourse plugin sends WP posts to Discourse?
I’m not finding the topic right now, but there was a more recent discussion about this - Facebook’s terms of service prevent a plugin being written on Facebook with the purpose of sending information elsewhere.
I would like to do the opposite; post a digest every day on a FaceBook group of what happened today on the Discourse forum. It would be posting data TO FaceBook so shouldn’t be against their TOS, but the goal would be to give people a link back to discourse in their FB newsfeed.
Sure, that makes sense as a way to advertise a vibrant Discourse community to your Facebook channel. @justin do we have a way of helping to set this up?
I’m guessing the best way is to use a service like Zapier if you want to automate it – you can select a new category to watch via its RSS feed (i.e. https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/2.rss) using Zapier’s RSS feed monitoring tool, then create new Facebook posts for the new topics.
Thanks. Not sure how the new category idea would work. I guess admins would have to manually move popular posts into that category to be zapiered to FB. But it does have potential for having a special FB category where posts are explicitly copied to FB.
I did think of creating a dummy user, locking it to Trust 0, and not logging into it so discourse would mail it a daily digest summary and using Zapier to report that on Facebook groups. The only downside is that it includes a summary since the dummy account last logged on, but otherwise it’s close to what I want - a summary of popular publicly visible (trust 0) posts.
You could use a tag for this — append .rss to the tag URL and use that in Zapier. Then when staff adds the tag to the topic, it’s added to the list. That way you don’t have to move the topics to a specific category.
My primary goal is for the facebook group to regularly broadcast the existence of a vibrant discourse forum (to use @codinghorror’s term) off facebook. The digest mechanism can be leveraged to do that because it collects a summary of the most popular things that have happened in the past day by using zapier to repost digest mails into the facebook group.
But I can also add the ability for a user making a post to request the post to be copied to the facebook group by tagging it with a specific magical tag. And then the .rss feed of that tag can be used to add posts to the facebook group.