This creates a very useful soft link between sync and async channels in order to reduce fragmentation.
The integration is done with the matrix channels, which are themselves bridged with other (semi)closed platforms like telegram, discord or even IRC.
Integration can be done globally or at any category level, allowing for example only the “outdoor” category to send new topics to matrix/telegram “OSMFR outdoor” chat channel.
I’m moving this topic to the main #site-feedback category for further discussion. Once it’s clear what the request is, we can move it to the request subcategory.
I think a link at the category level would be very useful for smaller communities. For example, the Portugal community, to which I belong, doesn’t use the forum much (neither the old one nor this Discourse*), so threads here would likely be overlooked. Having an automatic announcement in the Telegram chat for new threads in the category would definitely help the various discussion platforms have a wider reach and broader community participation.
* I realize the category for the country doesn’t exist yet, but that’s a separate issue that I hope will be handled soon.
@kmpoppe’s Telegram bot creates announcements in the German Telegram group every time a topic in the Germany and Austria category is created. I am sure he can help if you’d like to set it up for your community .
Thanks! I wonder, though, if each community should set such an integration manually, or whether there could be a more general solution that communities could adopt more easily. It seemed like this is what @cquest was proposing in his initial post above.
Right, but if I am reading things right, the discourse-chat-integration plugin that @cquest mentioned would enable that functionality to be set up in the Discourse side, rather than require a separate bot for each group chat for the various communities.
It seems to me that doing it this way would decrease the overall effort to set these integrations up, and ensure a more consistent experience — and perhaps even make it easier to handle possible bugs or improvements in the plugin project, which would trickle down automatically to every linked chat. Or am I misinterpreting how things would work?
My understanding from conversations with @Firefishy is that it’s preferred to reduce the plugin dependency for the forums maintenance, that’s why my suggestion to implemented this individually using generic rss bots for now.
Also note that Discourse is developing its own chat platform as an official plugin and they are already working on integrating/connecting it with Matrix, so potentially in the future it can be bridged to IRC, Telegram, Slack and other rooms altogether.
