Discourse, the open-source platform that powers this forum, has an official Chatroom Integration Plugin that supports some of the platforms used by various Wikimedia communities, like Telegram or Discord.
The plugin is relatively sophisticated at sending automatic notifications to external channels. It can send notifications when a new post is posted on a certain category or tag, and it also allows more complex rules. In theory, we could serve different channels on Telegram, Discord, Slack… with the notifications they want to receive.
This would be a way to keep informed any Wikimedia channel about the types of updates they want to receive without creating extra work. It would be interesting to test at least a couple of cases during the community review, to see how they work in practice.
Is there anyone interested in proposing a Wikimedia channel to test this functionality?
There have been various comments in various discussions about the opportunity to connect the various community channels that exist in various commercial platforms. Let’s try this plugin and see how it works in practice.
The Movement Strategy channel and the Hubs channel on Telegram are good candidates.
What other channels would you like to test?
@Tgr if you have ideas for a Matrix integration, let’s talk.
Any Discord users reading this?
And what about Slack? This plugin integrates tightly with Slack.
The plugin has been configured to send automatic messages to the Wikimedia Movement Strategy channel on Telegram. Every new post should send a new message, except when it is posted on #general:off-topic#site-feedback:sandbox and private categories.
More Telegram channels welcome. Now that this is set up, establishing more connections is trivial (it was easy to set up anyway, and half of the “work” was to create the Telegram bot).
I’d be worried of ending up with channels with mostly robot messages which are off-putting to participants. For channels which which are about some narrow topic (e.g. wikimedia-hubs Telegram/Matrix channel and the Hubs sub-category here), announcing each new post is fine. For more generic channels, something like a daily summary might work better IMO.
Yes, flodding general channels with many automatic posts is a risk, agreed. Let’s see how it goes on the MS chat im Telegram. If it’s not useful as is we could use i.e. a specific tag that only moderators can use to mark topics to be posted there.
Connecting the Hubs Telegram channel with the Hubs category is a good idea.
As soon as the tags are fixed (hopefully this week) we can do the same with the MS grants Telegram channel and a #grants tag.
When the tags are fixed we will have “language tags” automatically assigned to topics where someone posts in a specific language. This would allow to send automatic updates.to the Wikimedia Klingon Discord whenever someone posts something I’m Klingon here. Some language communities might find this useful.
The bot messages landing in the MS Telegram channel were indeed quite “random” in that context. I have disabled that bot for now. When the tags are fixed we can try to add a tag to the filter that only moderators can assign to topics. This way mods can decide which topics are announced on that Telegram channel.