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Topic-icon Synchronising EasyDiscuss with a Facebook group

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10 years 6 months ago #37480 by adathy
I want to automatically send new EasyDiscuss posts to our Facebook group, and have any ensuing conversations to take place in BOTH Facebook and EasyDiscuss. In other words, if someone replies via Facebook, the reply shows-up in the EasyDiscuss thread; and if someone replies via EasyDiscuss it shows-up on the Facebook thread.

Is anything like this on your radar? If so, could you provide details.
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10 years 6 months ago #37484 by alzander
Adam,
We don't have anything like that currently. One of our goals over the next couple of releases (v5.2 late this month, v5.3 around the end of the year, and beyond) is to increase the pushing of content to Facebook as well as pulling of content back into your site. For the v5.2 release, what you're looking for definitely will *not* be available as a one-click option.

With that said, we are planning to have ways to show conversations on Facebook more easily in your site. Actually pulling that content and storing it in an EasyDiscuss database table and pushing ED content to the same thread on FB will be much more difficult. However, you're not the first user to ask for exactly this option, so it is something we're taking seriously.

I hope that helps answer your question, even though there were no real specifics there. If you have anything else you'd like to know or feedback on, we'll gladly answer what we can. It's difficult to give specific answers about timelines though as things do change.. but deeper content integration is coming.

Thanks,
Alex
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10 years 6 months ago #37492 by adathy
Thanks for the prompt reply Alex!

This is a pretty high priority for us, so I would consider doing it as custom code. If it were done via JBFConnect, would it require extensive hacking of your core, or could it be done as a module? And do you have any sense of how much work would be involved to create this functionality via JBFConnect (eg approximate man hours)? I know that it is impossible to know for certain, but you'd have a better idea than me =)

Also, do you ever accept sponsored development? You mentioned that there are others who want this functionality. If several of us chipped-in with some funding, would you be able to give this feature priority?

This would be a killer feature for EasyDiscuss, as it would drastically increase the reach of each discussion, and also have a strong viral effect! So I'm confident you would also benefit from a surge in patronage by EasyDiscuss users, of which there are many.
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10 years 6 months ago #37552 by alzander
Adam,
We've been doing some investigation since the other post I referenced. We haven't done any development, but I'll tell you a little about where the thought process is from us...

The biggest issue is Facebook restrictions on what can be posted automatically to a page. First, there has to be a real user that the comment/reply comes from. So, if we were to implement the above as you suggested, any reply on Facebook would have to be from a real Facebook user. Obviously everyone on your site wouldn't be a Facebook user, so, we'd have 2 options:
* Don't post that comment to Facebook, which could really break up the discussion and make things impossible to understand
* Have the post come from the 'Page' owner. Unfortunately, Facebook has strict restrictions on how many times a Page can respond to another user: 2 times. After 2 responses in a row, the Page wouldn't be able to 'act' like a guest on your Page until another real Facebook user posted.. again, this has the effect that the discussion could quickly get fragmented. Presumably this is meant to prevent the admin from badgering a user with constant responses without them getting a response in.

Some options we've considered are:
* Automatically post the initial question on the Facebook Page with a link back to the actual EasyDiscuss post
* Have an automated system to post to a Facebook Page something like "xyz discussion on yoursite.com had '12' replies today". This could be automated to post every x posts or y hours.
* Something else we haven't thought of.

There's a lot of things that are probably possible. To create a 'link' between an EasyDiscuss thread and a Facebook Page comment thread shouldn't be that difficult. It's what to do after that connection has been made and how to adhere to what Facebook's Policies and restrictions are.

Obviously, if you have any thoughts or ideas, let us know. We'll poke holes where we can (knowing what we know about Facebook) and, hopefully, we'll come to a great idea!

I'll be pointing the other poster over here now as well and hopefully we'll get a good discussion going.

Thanks,
Alex
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10 years 6 months ago - 10 years 6 months ago #37561 by adathy
In our case, the project is a new site, and a large percentage of our target audience have Facebook accounts. So we are seriously considering making Facebook logins a requirement for posting on our site. Obviously, this would not be an option for site owners with an existing forum, but it is an approach that new sites could consider. It really boils down to an assessment of whether the benefits of leveraging Facebook outweigh the downside of alienating some users.

Of course, many site owners (especially those with existing users) would not want to do something this Draconian. So I think it's a great idea to encourage interested parties to contribute ideas about a solution which would not require all posts to be made by a Facebook user.

In terms of the options you posted above, I have a question:

Usually when an external site posts something to Facebook, there is a "Comment" link on the message. Is this link mandatory? If it is mandatory, that's a problem, because the discussion will simply take place on Facebook. If it can be omitted, these solutions might indeed drive some traffic to EasyDiscuss, but not having a discussion take place on Facebook will significantly reduce the viral-potential of the Facebook post.

I will also continue mulling-over other options, and report back if I have any inspiration :)
Last edit: 10 years 6 months ago by adathy.
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10 years 6 months ago #37563 by adathy
I'm not sure if you're already aware, but both EasyDiscuss and EasyBlog already support autoposting to Facebook:

stackideas.com/docs/easydiscuss/autopost...osting-with-facebook
stackideas.com/docs/easyblog/autoposting...osting-with-facebook

The problem is, you are simply creating a discussion on Facebook, not your site.
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10 years 6 months ago #37576 by petgal
Hi Gents,
Am VERY happy to see this discussion taking place. I'm not sure how best I can move this forward because I'm certain I do not understand all the implications or even what's best for me.

Our main concern/objective I think is to leverage Facebook traffic to build membership and activity on our joomla site not the other way around. So we must take care not to benefit Facebook at the expense of our site. We must find some way to make the FB conversation visible on our Joomla site while nudging Facebook users to continue the discussion (the full discussion) on our Joomla site.

I expect to have a lot of non-FB users on my site and it would be great if a FB user understands that to participate in the full discussion they must participate on our site, but the full thread is somehow visible on Facebook.

That may be impossible or not worth the technical effort or illegal on Facebook, but a simple low-tech solution is to somehow make it visible on the facebook post that the full discussion (meaning that they may not be seeing all the responses) are visible on "www.yoursitename.com/discussion thread). This could be some text that is placed just below the question that is being shown on Facebook, along with the link back to our site.

Just being able to show the Facebook discussion on my site (even if my site members responses aren't reflected on Facebook) is valuable as it demonstrates 'social proof' on my site. I was looking for some way to leverage facebook activity as social proof on my site. My site would essentially be offering a window into the Facebook activity a discussion (from my site) is generating.
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10 years 6 months ago #37612 by petgal
oh, and while we're discussing this, there was another related request that I had made regarding posting individual threads on different Facebook Groups. Hey if Alex can make magic happen why not ask for something BIG ;-)

The idea is to accomplish what we've been discussing above but to have different threads appear on different facebook pages or groups. Reason is certain groups or forum discussions may apply to specific and different Facebook pages/groups and if these discussions could be posted on the relevant group that would be great.
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10 years 6 months ago #37720 by aphils
If anyone figures out how to accomplish this (that is, somehow pulling the Facebook comments from the autoposted discussion back into EasyDiscuss), I would love to hear about it.

I'd even be willing to cosponsor a custom project to make this happen! Seriously: this would be a game changer.
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10 years 6 months ago #37736 by adathy
@Amy: If there isn't a SourceCoast solution, I will probably resort to custom code. But for the reasons Alex outlined above, the custom code will probably entail restricting EasyDiscuss posting to just Facebook users. Would this be a viable option for you?
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  7. Synchronising EasyDiscuss with a Facebook group
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