Live — connect today
Discourse is per-forum by design. An administrator issues an API key for the forum you take part in, and FounderReply can act only there — there is no cross-forum discovery. It drafts topics, replies and private messages, and every one of them waits in the approval queue.
On Discourse
Per-forum API key, forum-scoped search, topics, replies and DMs.
The agent can only see and act on the single Discourse install the key belongs to. That is a limit, and on a forum it is usually the right one.
There is no cross-forum index in the connector: search, replies and messages all run against the one instance URL stored on the connected account.
Full-text search over the forum finds the threads where your product is on-topic, which on a busy community forum is most of the work.
Forum search is a plain authenticated API call, so results respect the categories your API user can already read — private categories stay private.
Discourse keys are long-lived, so there is no refresh dance and no silent disconnect weeks later. Revoking is an admin action in the forum.
The API key is the credential and never refreshes; the connector stores it with the acting username, because Discourse authenticates as a specific forum user.
The room
Discourse runs the community forums of a large share of developer tools, open-source projects and SaaS products. If your buyers are in one, they are in it repeatedly and by name — which makes a forum a very different surface from a feed. You are not reaching an audience; you are participating in a room where people recognise each other.
Discourse gates new accounts by trust level: a fresh account cannot post links, cannot message freely, and is visibly new to everyone reading. Forums also police self-promotion through people rather than filters, and those people are usually the ones who run the product the forum is about.
The ceiling
Two layers decide whether an action happens by itself: your autonomy dial, and a hard ceiling we impose per platform. The safer of the two always wins, so the dial can make things stricter and never looser. This table is generated from that ceiling.
| Action | Ships as | Most permissive allowed |
|---|---|---|
| Publish your own postOriginal content from your connected account | Waits for your approval | May run automatically |
| Reply on your own postsAnswering comments left on your content | Waits for your approval | May run automatically |
| Direct messagePrivate messages to a person | Waits for your approval | Waits for your approval |
| Comment on someone else’s postThe highest-risk action on every platform | Not permitted | Waits for your approval |
Discourse forums gate new accounts by trust level and police self-promotion through their own moderators. Publishing your own topics and replying on your own threads may run unattended; replying to other people and sending private messages are held for a human.
An administrator issues the key in the forum’s admin area — you cannot self-serve one — and it is revoked from the same place.
Nothing here is a marketing paraphrase — it is the string the connect flow sends, copied from app/api/v1/connect/discourse.
POST /api/v1/connect/discourse
{
"workspace_id": "ws_…",
"instance_url": "https://forum.example.com",
"api_key": "…",
"api_username": "yourname"
}FAQ
A forum administrator, in the forum’s own admin area. You cannot self-serve one, which is deliberate on Discourse’s part: the key acts as a named forum user, so the forum’s owner decides whether an automated tool gets to act there at all.
No. Discourse has no cross-forum index and the connector holds one key for one install, so discovery, replies and messages all stay inside that forum. Connecting a second forum means a second key issued by that forum’s admin.
No. Discourse API keys are long-lived and there is no refresh flow, so the connection does not quietly lapse. Revoking it is an admin action inside the forum, and it takes effect immediately for every action the agent would take.
They apply to the agent exactly as they apply to you, because the key acts as a forum user. A new account cannot post links or message freely until the forum promotes it, and the API returns the same refusal the web interface would.
The free plan connects one account and drafts replies for you to approve. Nothing is published until you release it.