N8n support for Discourse - Automation Tool

Continuing the discussion from How to make requests to the Discourse API with Zapier:

Open source variation of Zapier and IFTTT, similar to Node-Red and TriggerHappy, which is easy to use and currently supports about 150 apps. Could be a useful way to automate posting to a particular topic / category / group or perhaps sending custom notifications. Linked site includes all documentation for writing custom integrations. Curious on potential ways to implement this with Discourse.

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Does it currently support discourse?

Is there a particular thing that you’d like to do with it?

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I was curious on what others think… my mind has been concerned with chat integrations based on tags triggering actions, and groups moderating things.

Looking over n8n current integrations, a few things come to mind. This post on integrating IFTTT is really helpful for triggering Posts, Topics and PM’s.

It would be awesome if a trigger could also relate to tags.

Integration might currently allow:

  • Custom Chat Notifications to unsupported services
  • Custom RSS feeds
  • Migrate Trello cards / boards to Discourse
  • Federate Posts, Topics, PM’s to Mastodon / Pleroma / ActivityPub
  • Creation of a particular Topic triggers a new chat room to be opened in Matrix and linked back as a Post.
  • Creation of a Topic on my Discourse causes the Topic to be posted on your Discourse as well.

One of the most interesting aspects of automation is it allows 2-way communication. Trello could be running in addition to the Kanban component on Discourse, continuously communicating. Or a conversation mirroring between Slack and Discourse. Hope this helps get the ideas flowing.

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Big thanks to Harshil! You may now use:

category, user, user group, group, user post
 Create
Create a category
Get All
Get all categories
Update
Update a category 
 Add
Create a user to group
Remove
Remove user from group
 Create
Create a user
Get
Get a user
Get All
Get all users 
 Create
Create a post
Get
Get a post
Get All
Get all posts
Update
Update a post 
 Create
Create a group
Get
Get a group
Get All
Get all groups
Update
Update a group 
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One very interesting thing to do would be to transfer to Mautic information about activity on Discourse, to identify users that that put more energy into Discourse. So, for example opening a new thread or replying would result in a transfer of this information to Mautic.

I understand that’s possible with N8N. I will get into this workflow soon because we get rid of Mailerlite and have plans to integrate and simplify out communication soon.

One obvious way to use n8n is with Discourse’s pre-existing RSS feeds.

I use RSS as a way to set up an active search for terms that I’m interested in across different platforms. RSS is the one protocol that pretty much everything speaks, or can be translated into ( e.g. rss-bridge).

It looks like someone has built an n8n node for Discourse, so that will probably be pretty easy to use. And as the documentation says, if any API calls you’re expecting aren’t supported you can always drop down to the HTTP Node and make REST calls if you know what you’re doing.

I’ve used n8n for marketing automations and I think it’s a pretty decent tool. I’m happy that it’s open source, which I think makes a much stronger case for owning your intellectual property, i.e. not building out a huge part of your business logic on a propriety platform subject to rate changes and arbitrary deplatforming. So there might be some common sentiment with those in the Discourse community.