Social & Community · Integration
Discourse
Add Discourse to your product for your customers, and give your AI agents governed access to it.
Discourse runs a customer's own community, and the first thing an integration must accept is that there is no single host: every forum is its own instance at its own domain, so the base URL is per customer rather than a constant. Topics and posts are distinct, with a topic being the thread and posts the replies, so creating a reply means posting into a topic rather than creating a new one. Categories carry permissions, which means a read that ignores them can surface a private staff discussion in your product. Authentication is an API key paired with a username, and the username determines what is visible. fastn holds the per-instance address and credential for each customer.
In your product
Embedded for your customers. Per-tenant auth, no per-customer code, maintained by fastn.
Let a customer connect their own Discourse instance so community activity appears inside your product.
Read topics and posts with category permissions respected, so private discussions stay private.
Post a reply or create a topic from your product on behalf of a named user.
React when a topic is created or replied to, rather than polling a busy forum.
For your AI agents
Governed, audited access for the agents you build, through the MCP server.
An agent summarises what a community has been discussing this week.
An agent posts a reply within governed permissions, with the write audited per tenant.
An agent flags topics that have gone unanswered for too long.
Example prompt
Which topics this week have no staff reply, and what are people asking about most?
Set up Discourse in 4 steps
- 01Enable the Discourse connector from your fastn dashboard.
- 02Have each customer authorise their own Discourse account, so calls run under their credentials rather than a shared key.
- 03Decide which posts, pages and comments your product needs, map those fields, then enable the actions and triggers you want.
- 04Call it from your product and expose it to your agents through the same governed connection.
Why teams use the Discourse integration
What you get by embedding it with fastn instead of building it yourself.
- Ship a Discourse integration without building it. Your customers connect their own Discourse account inside your product and work their posts, pages and comments there, with no per-customer code on your side.
- Handle the part that actually costs time: anything published is public immediately, and each network gates access behind its own review process. fastn owns the auth, token refresh, rate limits, pagination and breaking-change fixes, so a Discourse update is not your on-call problem.
- One integration serves your product and your agents. The same governed Discourse connection powers in-product features and gives AI agents scoped, audited access, so you publish and listen from inside your product instead of a separate social tool without wiring it twice.
Used by these teams
Compare with
RedditWorks well with
Slack
DiscordOften used alongside
Tools the same teams tend to run next to Discourse, across other categories.
Salesforce
HubSpot
Pipedrive
Zoho CRMDiscourse integration FAQ
How do I add a Discourse integration to my product?
Enable the Discourse connector in your fastn dashboard, then let each customer authenticate their own Discourse account. fastn handles the OAuth flow, token storage and refresh per tenant, so there is no Discourse client code in your app and no per-customer branch in your codebase. Setup is 4 steps.
Do my customers each connect their own Discourse account?
Yes. Every connection is scoped to the individual customer, so each authorises their own Discourse account and only ever sees their own posts, pages and comments. That per-tenant isolation is the point of an embedded integration: you support the long tail of customer setups without maintaining an integration per customer.
Can AI agents use this Discourse integration?
Yes. The same connection is exposed to your agents through the fastn MCP gateway, with permissions scoped per tenant and every call audited. An agent summarises what a community has been discussing this week.
Who maintains the Discourse integration?
fastn does. When Discourse changes an endpoint, deprecates a field or alters its auth, the fix lands in the connector rather than in your backlog, and your customers' connections keep working.
Can my product publish to a customer's own Discourse account?
Yes. Each customer authorises their own account, so a post goes out as them, under their permissions, never from a shared account you own. That also means a customer revoking access affects only their own connection.
Can I read engagement back from Discourse?
Yes. Comments, reactions and reach come back scoped per tenant, so your product can act on them or show them in your own reporting without one customer's numbers mixing with another's.
What can I build with the Discourse integration?
A common starting point: let a customer connect their own Discourse instance so community activity appears inside your product. Teams also use it for the other use cases listed above, and expose it to agents for governed reads and writes.
How much does the Discourse integration cost?
It is included. Pricing is based on connected accounts, not on how many connectors you enable, so adding Discourse does not change your per-connector cost. You can start free with 3 connected accounts.
Add Discourse to your product
Start free with 3 connected accounts. No sales call required, and no per-customer integration code.