How to link your community to the discourse app?

[MAR (IOD)]

Hello Discourse Friends,

My client recently asked if there was an app for the community that we created using discourse. I noticed that a discourse app exists. Is there a way to have my client’s discourse instance operate via the discourse app for android and IOS? Or is this discourse app just for the meta.discourse.org community?

What are the benefits of the App? Will it allow my clients to get notified of conversations directly to their phone?

How do I go about these tasks?

[Ivan_Rapekas]

Hi @MAR! This is an application which uses Google Chrome inside itself. Sure, the app supports any discourse instances. You get common benefits of mobile application, such as notification alerts with a bubble, fast access to the community with a predefined login etc.

Anyway, it should be tested carefully on your environment before recommending to your customer. Thus, my proxy server blocked message and status updates, therefore our clients did not receive notifications until I found a problem on my side.

By the way, now it works.

[MAR (IOD)]

This is great news @Ivan_Rapekas. I would test it out a bit before advising my community to download and sign into the instance.

Does discourse also integrate to messenger type apps like telegram or WhatsApp? As the community manager for our discourse based site, I find I spend quite a bit of time talking to many members in whatsapp groups. (Our community profile consists of professionals from 80 plus countries). I wondered if there was an integrated way of consolidating all of these conversations into one place? This is especially since our community members can be hard to coordinate.

[Ivan_Rapekas]

Very interesting point concerning messengers like Telegram. Unfortunately I haven’t any experience except Slack integration…

Here it is an example of android notification:

[Ivan_Rapekas]

@MAR

Does discourse also integrate to messenger type apps like telegram or WhatsApp?

There are the following relevant topics on Telegram connectivity desire. As far as I know, it is chosen by developers rather than Whatsapp, because only Telegram provides complete API. This question is important for me too, therefore I would like to post these links here.

Telegram Notifications Plugin (discourse-telegram-notifications)

Discourse Telegram Notifications Plugin This plugin allows users to receive their notifications via a Telegram bot, allowing them to turn off email notifications and still keep up-to-date. You can “like” posts, and respond to them via the bot. Here’s a quick demo video: Before Starting Your forum must be using HTTPS, and have force_https turned on Your forum must be accessible to the internet, not only an internal network (in development, give ngrok a try). Getting t…

Set up Telegram integration using the discourse-chat-integration plugin

This howto describes how to setup the Telegram provider included in discourse-chat-integration. Install If you haven’t already, install the discourse-chat-integration plugin Setup Telegram Talk to the Telegram “Botfather” and setup a new bot. detailed instructions here Make sure to copy the token that the BotFather gives you. It will look something like this:110201543:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw Setup Discourse In your site settings, paste the token you got earlier in…

https://meta.discourse.org/t/paid-adding-whatsapp-share-feature/78571?u=ivan_rapekas

Create topics from a posts to Telegram group

With the new IFTTT Telegram channel I’ve managed to set up an applet so everyone in a Telegram group can create new topics in a discourse category just by texting on the Telegram group. Why? Because real time communications are noisy and most of the times you forget about the interesting stuff you share there. We wanted a way to “store” the relevant messages so we can elaborate or discuss asynchronously later. What would you need? An IFTTT account. A Telegram account and group (obviously) A d…