Sync group membership with external list of email addresses

Support
1

What would be the easiest way to do this?

An external script that runs nightly and uses Discourse’s API?

Or is there a plugin that exists already?

Thanks.

2

You are describing what is probably the worst solution to your problem. Can you take a step back and define the problem?

What’s maintaining the list? DiscourseConnect - Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso) is a likely solution, though there could be others.

2 Likes
3

I love the bluntness of computer people :slight_smile:

I was considering trying out Creating a read-only mailing list mirror with a private mailing list and therefore a private Discourse category.

1 Like
4

What would be the best way? Or even a slightly better way? If people on the list prefer the forum’s private category then it’s a win for Discourse.

5

If you don’t have those users managed in some external application then you could do something like this:

  def load_csv(path)
    CSV.parse(File.read(path), headers: true)
  end

  def update_group
   g=Group.find(43) #whatever group ID yo uwant
   GroupUser.where(group_id: g.id).destroy_all
   user_emails=load_csv('/path/to/file')
    user_emails.each do |u|
      user = User.find_by_email(u['Email'])
      next unless user
      puts "found user #{uid}"
      GroupUser.find_or_create_by(group_id: g.id, user_id: user.id)
    end
  end

Just how is a whole nother issue. A plugin, perhaps.

Maybe a plugin that automatically adds a user to the group if they post in the category?

1 Like
6

Thanks for this.

The category would only be visible to members of the group so there would be a chicken and egg scenario here!

I’m fairly accustomed to PHP so think I could write a script that takes the email addresses from Mailman 2 (it has a Python script for that) and checks them against the Discourse user list, adding or removing Discourse users from the relevant group as appropriate. I know you said this is “probably the worst solution”…

I’ve not even set up the mailing list mirror yet, so these are just ideas so far.

1 Like
7

Yes, but I was thinking that you’d be importing data to the list some other way.

You could also make the group allow requests and have discourse handle that.

8

I hate php, so your solution is sounding worse! :joy:

But the discourse api is pretty easy to figure out, so I think your solution is sounding like the right one for you!

If mailman has hooks, you could have it make api calls when it updates the subscriber list.

1 Like
9

There’s a category setting called something like “… Mirrors a list” that might also be helpful.