Visual arts category
This e-mail was sent from a contact form on Hackspace Manchester (https://www.hacman.org.uk)
That post came from the website, for a new idea where people wanting to get in touch can fill in a form specifying which department they want to get in touch with.
The post title was intentionally dull, but real users would describe what it is they’re doing.
Try it out: https://www.hacman.org.uk/contact-new/
Password: bikeshed
Interesting. How do people get responses to messages sent this way?
Yeah, that’s the bit I’m struggling with! I’m not familiar with Discourse so any help is welcome…
Ideally, when the form is submitted and the email sent, Discourse would create a staged user (i.e. a placeholder user) with their email address, without exposing it. They would then get replies and if they wanted to reply back they could register and as long as they registered with the same email address, their replies would become part of their account. it’s a nice feature. But…
Currently the website form won’t allow pretending to be the user using email spoofing, and Discourse doesn’t seem to work with “reply-to” headers, which most email clients know to use when hitting reply to an email from website@hacman.org.uk.
Somehow Discourse needs to be able to get that an email from website@hacman.org.uk with a special header of user@domain.com means that a staged user is created for user@domain.com.
Think I’m going to set up a serverless function which receives email, then posts it here on behalf of the submitter.
Should then be nice and uncoupled from anything else. Hoping it’ll boost engagement with the forum
Will be nice if we can get this working with SSO from the membership system, but that’s another thing entirely 
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Update, thanks to @klkl for getting hacman card details into GCP.
I aim to get a cloud function written which is called by a user submitting a web form and then:
- Gets their information
- Does any verification
- Creates a new Discourse user under their email if not already
- Creates a new post as them
Will get it on GitHub so anyone can help with this which would be very welcome.
Not sure yet how to make a post on behalf of a user with the API. If not possible like it is with emailing in, then we can get creative