Having a user watch/track changes to any discussion of a page

[sylque]

Sometimes, the web page that is being discussed has got an "owner", and this "owner" wants to be notified whenever something happens in any discussion in the page.

[sylque]

Every Docuss balloon corresponds to a Discourse tag. So what needs to be done here is, for the "owner", to enable notifications for all those tags.

Right now tags are created when a first topic is created. This saves a lot of useless tags, because in a document with hundreds of balloons, many will never have topics.

I see two solutions :

1. Allowing creation of tags beforehand, i.e. at web page creation

This would have the drawback of creating many useless tags.

I see two ways to implement this:
1.1. Docuss could provide a client-side API function: it would allow the user currently logged-in in Discourse to create the tags and enable notifications. Drawback: the client app would need to ensure that page creation is possible only when the user is logged-in in Discourse.
1.2. The client app could use the Discourse API (Docuss could provide an interface to ease that process). This would require the client to set up an API key and connect its app to the Discourse server correctly (deployment complexity).

2. Catching tag creation and enabling notifications on the fly

This would require server-server communication between Discourse and a client app, the client app being in charge of knowing "owners" of pages. One way of doing this would be to use Discourse webhooks and then to use the same solution as 1.2 above.

[sylque]

Discourse API to set notifications:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-create-a-follow-button-for-a-topic-and-post-it-on-an-external-website/91266/2

[sylque]

I'm planning to implement solution 1.1 in the near future. The Docuss API will provide a function track(dcsTag).

[sylque]

Implemented in dcs-discourse-plugin2 v1.0.22 and dcs-client v1.0.20. See the documentation here.