Hello Discourse team and community,
I am a long-time user and host of my own Discourse instance. I also actively contribute to several other Discourse-based communities.
The Challenge:
I often create high-effort posts on other forums. To preserve my digital footprint and maintain a personal knowledge base, I want to archive these discussions onto my own self-hosted Discourse instance.
Currently, I have to manually copy-paste everything, which is tedious. More importantly, a lot of value lies in the conversation context (replies from others), not just my original post. Without the replies, the archive feels incomplete.
The Feature Request:
I am looking for a solution (or a plugin idea) that can act as a “Discourse-to-Discourse” bridge.
Specifically:
- Monitor: Watch my user profile on a remote Discourse site.
- Sync: When I create a new topic there, automatically pull the full content (Markdown + Images) to my local instance.
- Context Preservation: Ideally, it should also import the replies to keep the discussion readable.
Regarding Data & Ethics:
I understand that importing other users’ replies might raise concerns about “scraping” or impersonation. To address this, the tool could:
Import replies as “Quoted Text” blocks instead of creating fake user accounts.
Or, attribute them to a generic “External User” system account with a clear footer: “Originally posted by [Username] on [Source Site]”.
This would be a game-changer for content ownership and decentralization, allowing us to participate in communities while keeping a permanent copy of our contributions at home.
Has anyone implemented something similar, or could this be achieved via existing webhooks/API scripts?