Discourse looks amazing. Wow! A big change from my old days using phpbb.
In the past, admittedly a long time ago now, I’ve had greater success starting new forums by initially seeding some content. A little social proof does wonders for engagement levels!
Would love to know whether it is possible to seed a new discourse forum. What I’d like to do is to create say 200 user accounts and roughly 1000 topics and replies before launching.
Is it possible to do this without having either 200 email addresses or 200 social accounts?
I’d like to add these users from the admin panel and log in to them occasionally to respond to new users.
Seems disingenuous, but you can create multiple users with a single email account by using email addresses like this:
my.gmail.username@gmail.com
my.gmail.username+user1@gmail.com
my.gmail.username+joe@gmail.com
my.gmail.username+funnyguy@gmail.com
my.gmail.username+smartypants@gmail.com
my.gmail.username+guyWeHate@gmail.com
and so on. Most email systems support this convention.
There’s a bulk import feature, so you could create them all in a spreadsheet or whatever.
The API is a great took but you might also put the content in some database and write an importer to populate Discourse. See vanilla.rb and vanilla_mysql.db for examples. I just wrote an importer to import an image gallery. I thought it was a bad idea at first, because it would seem like an image gallery would be a good way to display an image gallery. But it turns out that the image gallery in Discourse is pretty freaking great.
I’m not a coder, so I’d probably look at doing things your way Jay.
Certainly not trying to be disingenuous, but I think it’s important to get the ball rolling with some posts. That way, others are more likely to join in.
If you already have the 1000 posts and 200 usernames created in some machine-readable format it would probably be worth a few minutes to look at how the API works and/or paying someone to do it for you, but then, I’m a programmer, so I would think that. Or course, I’d rather spend 20 hours writing code than 10 copy-and-pasting, because what if you ever needed to do it again?
Hey Joe,
You’re definitely right about social proof, but creating fake users is questionable practice and I’d strongly recommend against it, for the long term health of your community. There are more ethical ways of doing it (which won’t result in a backlash). If you want some advice around doing things differently, I’m happy to help.
I read your article and it makes a lot of sense. Developing a community the right way might take a bit longer but I think it will be better in the long run.
You have turned me around. I think my thinking is a little 2009.
I cannot imagine that the API for posts doesn’t include the userid. Perhaps the documentation is wrong. There is a post about reverse engineering the API that might help,
Ha! Now I get it. I guess I need a better imagination. Thanks, @cpradio.
So it would seem that the way to create seed data with many users would be to modify an import script. It’s probably easiest to get your data into MBOX form and use the mbox importer.
