Discourse integration

This guide will walk you through setting up the Discourse integration.

The Orbit Discourse integration allows you to connect your Discourse instance to Orbit.

The integration will automatically create an Activity for any new topic or new reply, and it will save that Activity to an existing member's profile. If the post is from a person not already associated with your workspace, Orbit will create a new member.

🚧The Orbit Discourse integration only works with public Discourse hosts. Orbit will not be able to pull data from Discourse hosts that require a user login.

Initially, Orbit will import the last 12 months of activity with a limit of up to 100,000. If you'd like more history, just let us know.

Connect your Discourse account

If you're setting up a new workspace, you'll see the Connect Discourse button during setup.

If you're adding Discourse to an existing workspace, navigate to your workspace settings page, then to the Integrations tab and click the Discourse logo in the Plug & Play Integrations section.

Create an API key on Discourse

You need to be a Discourse Admin to setup a new Discourse integration

1. In the Discourse Admin interface, go to the API tab and create a new API Key

2. Fill out the API Key form as follows
3. User Level: Single User;
4. User: your username;
5. Do not select "Global Key (allows all actions)"
6. Scopes: select topics:read, topics:read lists, users:show and users:check emails

📘You can opt-out of retrieving and using the members' email addresses available in Discourse. This will prevent us from populating your members’ emails, and linking their Discourse identities to any other we might have available in your community already (e.g. their GitHub or Twitter profiles). To do so, please send us an email at team@orbit.love with the name of the workspace you wish to opt-out and we will give you further instructions to proceed with the installation.

3. Save the form and copy the API key

If you have a Discourse group for your teammates, the integration can automatically mark its members as teammates. You can get its ID by visiting the group page and appending .json to the URL.

Configure the new Discourse integration in Orbit

After setting up your API key on Discourse, complete the Orbit form presented during the setup flow:

Connect Webhooks

1. In the Discourse Admin interface, go to the API tab and create a new Webhook

2. Fill out the Webhook form as follows

• Payload URL and Secret Key - Orbit will provide this during the setup process

• Content Type: Application/json;
• Individual events: Topic events and Post events;
• Triggered Categories and Triggered Groups: leave empty;
• Check TLS certificate of payload URL: Checked
• Active: Checked

Finally, save the form.

Due to Discourse rate limits, the import will take from several minutes to several hours.

Reporting

Discourse activity will now appear alongside other integrations in your reports.