Testing API Capabilities

This is a post made via the Discourse API

I have been playing with the Discourse API, and it is pretty powerful in what it allows me to do fully via code :partying_face:

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For more context, this may be a terrible experiment, but one thing I want to do is allow people who read the articles to post a question directly from that page without signing-in AND without having to actually go to the forums.

Questions they post will be under the kirupaBot account. My plan is to initially keep those posts hidden to avoid spam. If the question poster would like a follow-up to their question (which I’m guessing majority would), they will need to include their e-mail address. When a valid post is made, unhidden, and replied to, I’ll send an automatic e-mail to the poster with a link to their question and response. Any follow-ups will require them to register to reply, but the hesitation for them to not sign-up will be less since we would have proven out the value.

The only hold-up is me troubleshooting Firebase’s Cloud Functions where I have a Node.js environment that will securely store the API key and make the post from a client-side request on a tutorial page on kirupa.com :face_in_clouds:

As to why I’m optimistic about this working is that, every year or so, I temporarily turn on commenting via Disqus. Disqus commenting requires no sign-up and people always comment generously haha. The site also gets a lot of traffic, and I doubt all of those users have no questions. The friction of signing up to “yet another service that wants to associate my Twitter/FB/Google account” is annoying, so I want to shorten the time from “I want to ask something” to “I now have my question live”.

:slight_smile: