Tools to "aggregate" many Discourse forums?

The best way - he had already identified the need and wrote it a while ago :smiley:

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HI @tobiaseigen, long time indeed. The response I got to offcourse suggested there wasn’t much demand for it and I abandoned it. I’ve also drifted away from discourse (and ember).
Might need to get back into it soon though. I’m working on a real estate project now called PropertyWebBuilder and I could do with having a forum for it.
Will send you a PM.

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I completely concur with your vision.

I’ve just killed a project that attempted to migrate users off of a Facebook Group.

I failed.

Despite offering them a superior set of Discourse functionality, including bespoke plugins I had written to provide really rich domain functionality that blew a hole in Zucks side the one feature I could not compete with was the ability to show an aggregation of all the interest groups they were subscribed to.

“We loved your website, Robert, but it was just more convenient to scroll down Facebook” :angry:

If we had a single web page and web app that could show a feed of all your many Discourse site accounts now that would be just great.

Perhaps an RSS reader would suffice. Has anyone tried this? But ultimately you need a way to access with your individual accounts in the way the (excellent) iOS app does.

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This is conceptually great, but why was it written in React? If you build a tool for a big population of Discourse users, many of whom may be actively contributing plugins and Theme Components based on Ember, wouldn’t it be a good idea to write the app using Ember to help secure future support from the community?

It is a false dichotomy though, an alternate directory would still exist outside Facebook so nobody would go there. The only answer is incredibly compelling unique content, same as it ever was.

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But I’m using your team’s wonderful app all the time, and all it’s missing is a feed :wink:

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I wrote a proposal to tackle this exact problem: mix in many different Discourse activity in a central and social user feed.

You can follow your peers in Mastodon and add your “groups” (Discourse instances that you care about, like one about a game you like, one about your ioio hobby, etc) to be interleaved in your forum.

We can also do the same by making a robust Facebook / Twitter integration, that periodically picks a random topic/post from /top and puts it on social media. This is all possible already, but not easy for non-technical people.

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I follow many Discourse forums with my feed reader.
What I do is scrap the HTML and convert it to a feed.
Got it nailed pretty well by now, not only for Discourse, but for any other site.
This way, no need for the blackbox algorithms, it is all under my control.

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I’d be interested in something a little less sweeping to start: to simply aggregate several Discourse instances all under my own control. Having distinct sites allows each to be focused on a different topic or audience, but comes with some drawbacks. It would be nice to:

  • share user moderation across sites
  • be able to move posts and threads
  • have shared notifications
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This one you could do by making one of the forums the SSO server for the others.

I think that the other stuff would be pretty hard, I think–I suppose it could be done via a plugin and the API, but it sounds like thousands in development cost and a fair amount to maintain.

It turns out “nope”. I found out the hard way that disabling a user’s SSO account on the SSO side does not disable posting if they’re already logged on.

Yeah, they’ll stay logged in. You’d need to somehow add a webhook to log them out of the affiliated forums. I think that’d be reasonably easy in a plugin, like an hour or two for a talented developer (and a bit more for me!)

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Does Fig fit the bill?

Anyone know of one that runs on Windows or in a web browser?

Can you clarify what you’re asking for? I don’t understand what you are asking.

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