What would you like done?
We are seeking a developer or team to implement a feature in our Discourse forum that automatically combines consecutive posts by the same user. It should not remain as simple as that, that’s why we propose several conditions for posts to get merged and some admin configuration fine-tuning, to make such plugin (I don’t think component is able to do it via API) fit to different forum use cases should we allow this development to be open-source.
The key requirements for this feature include:
- Consecutive Posts replying to the same post should be merged.
- Consecutive Posts with no reply-reference should be merged
- There should be an adjustable time-frame window during which consecutive posts meeting other criteria should be merged.
- There may be additional settings introduced to plugin like these:
- Categories to which this functionality should apply
- User groups to which this functionality should apply (or rather selection of groups to exclude from this functionality to be applied)
We’re open to any other suggestions to make this development useful for different use cases.
Advanced requirement (not sure if it’s possible):
- Add post controls to “unmerge” merged posts, though I can’t see how to do it clean way, unless merging function will introduce some hidden meta-data to the raw post contents (or some other place in DB) when the posts are merged.
When do you need it done?
We are looking for this feature to be implemented within the next 3 months. However, we are open to discussing a timeline that is feasible for the developer/team while ensuring quality work.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
We have no budgets set for such task as this feature has no forecast of increasing our forum revenues. This would definitely improve users experiences in our forum instance, which is heavy in terms of speed of discussions and media files shared. We’re open to your quotes & suggestions.
Requirements for qualification
You should have at least some activity at meta.discourse.org in order to suggest yourselves as possible contractor. In case you’re new to Discourse Meta, please attach your portfolio links or/and something we could verify you as a credible developer/team.