Would Discourse meet all of these niche needs to be a video game community forum?

Dev
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Hello Discourse community,

I have a startup video game that I plan on dedicating a forum for. My ambitions may be a little out-there, though, so I wanted to know from someone a bit more experienced in this platform if I’m actually making the right choice here with Discourse. I plan on full integration, so one notification from forums go in-game, and vise versa. Example: Sending an offline player a private message would instead feed into their forum inbox, and when they log in, it notifies them of their offline inbox.

I already installed my first dev server and was impressed with the bells and whistles. I was certainly whelmed by it so much after going into the admin panel I had more questions than ever.

I would like to know how much of the following features are already in discourse and what I may have to implement myself.

1- If I wanted to automatically generate a forum account tied to a game account
2- If I wanted to set a user’s OAUTH secret (2FA) to match a game account 2FA (external source)
4- If I wanted to revoke permissions or add them via API (Add/Remove player moderators)
3- If I wanted to add badges or titles to a user via API (Awarding players with ‘flair’ for player competitions)
5- If I wanted to send out webhooks when a user gets an inbox message or notification (To send to my game server to forward as an ingame notification)
6- If I wanted to send out a webhook on a forum ban (to mute them from game servers too)
7- To ban someone via API or delete the user (if they get banned in game)
9 -Change a username via API (what they log in with, not notification emails, i.e. if they change their display name in game)

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You’ll have to implement some kind of social login for that.

I dont follow this. Could you elaborate?

It is possible

This may be possible through a custom plugin but I’m not aware of any such internal possibility

Again, You’ll have to do this in a custom plugin

This is possible

May be possible but I haven’t tried or implemented this.

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Firstly, thank you. You answered a lot of those questions excellently.

To elaborate on 2:

2FA uses a shared key, usually obfuscated behind a QR code. Whenever you scan a QR, you instead are scanning a private key to hash your quick time 2FA codes. I noticed that 2FA is possible on this website, but I’m not sure if it would be possible to distribute or assign these 2FA codes to accounts myself instead of users generating them.

Use case: Let’s say I handle 2FA on my game’s website. They sign up for 2FA on my website, and my website gives them a private key for their phone to log into the game and the forum. Hence, I want the same 2FA code to work for both game and forum account, and thus, behind the scenes I will assign their 2FA private key to their forum account when they successfully sign up.

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I mean, could I not just insert a user into the database? or is there not an API call to create an account? That’s surprising if not.

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@simbleau you got some answers wrong above, here are some correct ones:

We have customers doing this, you just need a single API call to create the forum account from your game account system.

In this case it’s easier to set the forum to use your game account system as the Identity Provider. You can implement the DiscourseConnect - Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso) to allow for that.

Easily done via API.

Easily done via API too!

We have support for webhooks for the Notification event, totally doable without any customizations needed.

The “User Event” webhook covers this.

Also just an API call.

Doable, but it can be quite expensive if the user has many posts.

2 Likes
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Thanks @Falco! This topic can be locked now.

I appreciate the feedback.

1 Like