Forum

Who this page is for: client website admins — the volunteers who run the day-to-day site once it's launched.

Discourse is used as the forum platform, due to it's mature ecosystem, flexible features, and that it's open source. The Discourse forum can either be self or cloud hosted.

The following documentation will set up the AMS service as the authentication provider for Discourse. This allows access to the forum to require an active membership.

Deployment

If you plan to self host Discourse, please read the documentation on GitHub.

Forum setup

There are several key settings that need to be set to ensure the forum works as expected with the AMS system. These need to be set by the administrator account for Discourse, and can be set on the site settings page.

Replace discourse_connect_secret

changeme below is a placeholder, not a value to copy verbatim. Generate your own secret and set it here, then set the exact same value as AMS's DISCOURSE_CONNECT_SECRET environment variable (see deployment: environment variables) — if the two don't match, SSO login fails.

# The following settings set up single sign on
enable_discourse_connect: 'true'
discourse_connect_url: <website domain>/forum/sso
discourse_connect_secret: changeme
logout_redirect: <website domain>

# The following settings complement using single sign on
invite_only: 'false'
login_required: 'true'
allow_new_registrations: 'false'
enable_signup_cta: 'false'
auth_skip_create_confirm: 'true'
auth_overrides_email: 'true'
auth_overrides_username: 'true'
auth_overrides_name: 'true'
auth_overrides_avatar: 'true'
email_editable: 'false'
discourse_connect_overrides_bio: 'true'
discourse_connect_overrides_avatar: 'true'
discourse_connect_overrides_profile_background: 'true'
discourse_connect_overrides_location: 'true'
discourse_connect_overrides_website: 'true'
discourse_connect_overrides_card_background: 'true'
gravatar_enabled: 'false'
automatically_download_gravatars: 'false'

# Prevent bootstrap mode
# See: https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/322876
bootstrap_mode_min_users: '0'

Admin sync

AMS is the source of truth for forum admin status. On every SSO login, AMS sends an admin field to Discourse based on whether the Django user is a superuser: superusers are granted Discourse admin, and everyone else has admin explicitly revoked. This means demoting a superuser in Django removes their forum admin rights on their next login, and it will also demote any user who was manually made an admin directly in Discourse. Regular Django staff (is_staff) are not granted any elevated forum role.

See Tutorial 8: Forum for a walkthrough of what this looks like from a client's side, including the "you must have an active membership" message a member without one sees.