Hi All, I’ve been scrutinizing the various JSON post results from our webhooks. We record and react to public posts that contribute to our common knowledge-base differently than PMs or discobot conversations. For example, it’s relatively easy to filter out posts from discobot using its userid; li…

It’s messy, but if you setup both a Post and a Topic webhook. When a message, or topic is first created, both hooks will be fired. You can use the topic_id that is sent with the Post webhook to get the topic archetype from the topic webhook data. It will be set to ‘private_message’ for messages, ‘re…

Thanks Simon, we’re also struggling with not getting consistent topic_created events. Instead we get post_created with post_number = 1 and no topic_created. We checked both our logs and API/webhooks - nothing. That changed today, which now leaves me at a loss. More here: https://meta.discourse.or…

[image] johnaschroeder: Instead we get post_created with post_number = 1 and no topic_created Why does it matter? post_created with post number 1 is definitely a new topic. What else could it be?

It didn’t, and we shrugged it off until we saw what we originally expected in the log today: topic_created and no post_created header with post_number = 1. Now we’ve seen both and I’m trying to understand why and what the expected behavior is. It matters because we missed an event that is one of…

I see, @tgxworld can you comment on this please?

[image] simon: It would be great to get some topic data sent with the Post webhook - category_id and archetype would both be useful. Yea those are definitely useful. Another thing that I noticed is that we’re sending the suggested_topics in the webhook payload. It adds quite abit of size to t…

@tgxworld Based on Simon’s reply, is the best way to differentiate a PM to make a request back to the API at “topics/get a single topic by id” and pass the ID for every post? Then if the archetype comes back private_message we’ll filter it out, if it comes back “regular” we’ll use it. We seem to g…

Any chance these might be topics that were moved or had ownership reassigned? Staged users?

I don’t think so. We have a very active group of veterinarians posting, but it’s very vanilla stuff. Topics and replies. To my knowledge no one has reassigned or moved a topic. We don’t stage users.

We’re running into a similar problem with the topic archetype not being in the post webhook. We’re using the webhook to create tickets in our support ticketing system when someone publicly posts or sends a private message to us. The problem is we handle public posts and private messages differently …

Webhooks: how best to differentiate a PM from a public post

Development

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) September 20, 2019, 10:26pm 13

Pull requests are always welcome

Topic		Replies	Views
Making a difference between public topic and private message on API Feature	3	565	February 1, 2019
Distinguish private messages from posts? Development	17	2124	October 13, 2016
Webhooks feedback Development	34	10887	March 21, 2017
Detect from topic payload if something was mailed or posted via web Support	8	800	July 28, 2017
Option to not send Private Topics for topic webhooks Feature	0	23	February 6, 2026

Webhooks: how best to differentiate a PM from a public post

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