Forum feed (new Discourse topics in a Team Chat channel)

What a topic looks like

Each new topic posts as one message from a 🔵 bot named after the forum:

New Topic posted in [Idea Hub > SOPs & More]        (bold)

How we label inbound shipments                      (a link to the topic)
by @Jordan Rivera                                   (a tag when they're in the channel)

If the person who posted on the forum is not a member of the channel, their forum name shows as plain text instead of a tag. Replies stay on the forum unless an admin turns on Post replies too; each reply then posts as "New Reply in […]" with a link straight to that reply.

Setting it up

1. Open the channel, then Edit channel, and find Forum feed near the bottom.
2. Enter the forum's web address (it must start with https://), a name for the bot (for example "JLS Forum"), and a read-only forum key. The key is used only to read the forum's category names and which categories are restricted; it can never post.
3. Click Connect. Omniscio checks the key by reading the categories, then shows a webhook address and a signing secret once. Copy both.
4. Give them to the forum's admin. In Discourse: Admin, Webhooks, Add Webhook. Paste the address as the Payload URL, the secret as the Secret, choose the Topic is created event (and Post is created only if you want replies), and limit it to the public categories.

Lost the secret? Disconnect and connect again; that issues a new address and secret.

What keeps it safe

• Every delivery must carry the forum's signature made with that feed's secret, or it is refused and nothing posts. The same topic arriving twice posts once.
• Topics are posted as the admin who connected the feed, through the same checks every Team Chat message goes through. If that admin leaves the workspace or loses access to the channel, the feed stops and the settings section says why.
• The key and secret are stored encrypted on the server and are never sent back to the app.
• Only https forum addresses on public hosts are accepted.

Turning it off

• An admin clicks Disconnect in the channel's settings.
• Server-wide, setting FORUM_FEED_DISABLED=1 on the forumWebhook function stops all posting.

Known limits

• The separate Team Chat phone app shows webhook messages as plain text, so there the title link appears as [title](address).
• A forum key encrypted before an AI-key-vault master rotation must be reconnected.

For developers

The contract is .claude/memory/contracts/forum-integration-contract.md. All Discourse handling lives in firebase/functions/src/forum/.