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jacobobryant / discord-forum-publisher

Host public copies of Discord forum channels
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Update README #5

Open djmbritt opened 1 year ago

djmbritt commented 1 year ago

Hi there!

I would love to use this, but I'm not very familiar with Clojure, could you by any chance write up some docs on how to use this tool?

jacobobryant commented 1 year ago

Sure! Do you mean docs for how to self-host the application? Or docs for how to use an instance that's already deployed? If the latter, you can view the instance I have deployed at discord.tfos.co. You're welcome to use that; you just need to click the Forum Publisher bot link on that page to add the bot to your Discord server. Of course that's probably best just for experimenting with the tool; if you're planning on using it seriously for your own Discord server, you'd probably want the forum publisher to be on your own domain.

For deploying, there are some instructions at https://biffweb.com/docs/reference/production/ which shouldn't require any knowledge of Clojure to follow. You'll need to install babashka though. That being said, I'm planning this week to try using Fly.io for deploying Biff apps. If that works out, then deploying should be as easy as creating a Fly account and running flyctl deploy.

Also note that this project is very much in a proof-of-concept state. I'm planning to develop it further but probably won't get to it for at least a few more months.

djmbritt commented 1 year ago

Hi there, My bad for the late response.

Indeed, I did try to use the current frontend that is deployed on discord.tfos.co. But it does not seem to display my hooked up Discord Server, and its forum channels.

Thanks for the instructions for deploying Biff. I'll try that tomorrow, see how far along I come with that.

It did seem as if it's pretty new, but we're looking into using a tool like yours to boost our SEO score using the content on our Discord server. So, we don't need anything fancy at the moment.

But thanks for making this tool and good luck with building it.

jacobobryant commented 1 year ago

But it does not seem to display my hooked up Discord Server, and its forum channels.

Ah, there must be a bug then. I'll try to take a quick look at that this weekend.

we're looking into using a tool like yours to boost our SEO score using the content on our Discord server.

Is this for a large/commercial server? If there's some latent market demand for something like this, there might be someone in the (nascent) Biff community interested in developing it further as a side project.

djmbritt commented 1 year ago

Great, thank you! I would really appreciate that.

Well, presently our server is still small. We hope to be bigger in the future. But looking around, there is only one other tool that does this service.

And I do think publishing a discord forum as a service might be valuable. I think it'll be a growing niche. There's a lot of content hidden away in those servers that people would be searching for.

jacobobryant commented 1 year ago

Sounds good! Hopefully if something like this became widely used, Discord would take the hint and provide public forums as an option.

jacobobryant commented 1 year ago

Finally got around to fixing this. there was an exception being thrown somewhere; I just suppressed the error. haven't pushed yet, but your server shows up at discord.tfos.co now.

I've been thinking that this discord bot could work well as part of one of my other projects, Platypub. (https://github.com/jacobobryant/platypub). it's a publishing platform, for blogs and stuff. I want to add integrations so you can import data from elsewhere (e.g. tweets, HN comments) and publish it all in one place on your own site. hence publishing the contents of a discord server would actually be quite in-scope.

platypub is itself quite rough still, but it is nevertheless an important project to me and I'm planning to get a much more polished version of it released sometime in 2023.

djmbritt commented 1 year ago

Thank you!

That's really useful actually, that would be a great way to aggregate all the scattered information over your different messaging, forum, blog services into one interface. I'll check it out.