Bridging to the F# Discord

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Hey there! I’m an admin on the F# Discord server, and we’ve recently added a webhook to notify users of activity on Discourse. However, this is unorganized and noninteractive on Discord.

By fully bridging our Discord forum (#just-ask) with Discourse, we could bring activity to Discourse while retaining the convenience of Discord. This will also publicize Discord forum posts and allow search engines to index them, which could improve the F# learning experience. Currently, we have hundreds of thousands of messages in our help channel alone and inaccessible elsewhere. To keep things compartmentalized, I would create a new category for the bridge.

If you’re up for this, there are some other implementation details:

  • For the Discord bot to create/modify posts/users, I would need a Discourse API key.
  • Should Discord users have a Discourse account auto-generated to represent authorship of Discourse posts?
  • To reduce spam, multiple messages from the same author can be merged.
  • Code attachments on Discord can be converted to code snippets on Discourse and vice-versa. Other attachments can be converted to links.

Let me know what you think.

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This is an interesting idea - and could be very useful, but I’d want to know more details about what your bot would do.

I know there are some existing bots on github that allow you to (manually) post from Discord to Discourse - this seems quite useful (ie: promote something to be more “permanent” on the forums). But I’d be worried if it was completely automatic, as the context of the two systems is quite different - one is more realtime vs the asynchronous nature of Discourse…

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I’ve not used discord forums, but I believe they are not the same as a discord channel, which is like IRC in spirit.

Discord forum is actually more like forum threads.

Concerns on my end:

  • if the bot doesn’t make the posts attached to author account on the forum, it will be messy, if they are all from same account, even if the info about authorship comes as part of the post contents
  • it is constructive for the community, to encourage people to register to the discourse forum, maybe the bot discord forum → discourse would prevent discord people from registering on this forum, which I think is not a win-win

But overall, it is relevant to explore bridging capabilities, great initiative!

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I already informed you on Discord (multiple times) that Discourse has an optional chat feature.