Discourse community monitor with hourly Slack digests
Build a workflow that monitors a Discourse community for new topics and alerts the community team so they can triage and respond quickly. Trigger it hourly with a cron schedule, but only process updates during configured waking hours in America/New_York; include overnight topics in the first morning digest. Fetch recent topics from Discourse—or another community forum—filter out team-authored posts, announcements, and topics already reported, then retrieve a short excerpt and reply count for each qualifying topic. Persist lightweight state between runs to prevent duplicate notifications and safely handle overlapping executions. If new topics exist, format them into one concise digest with linked titles and post it to Slack—or your team’s chat tool. Do not send a message when there are no qualifying topics or when the run is outside the monitoring window. Tools used: Discourse, Discourse, Slack, 3B
What this prompt builds
This workflow monitors a Discourse community forum for new topics created by non-team members, filters out announcements and previously reported content, then sends a consolidated digest to Slack on an hourly schedule during configured business hours. It maintains state between runs to prevent duplicate notifications and batches overnight topics into the first morning digest. Community teams use it to stay on top of member activity without manual checking.
The problem
Community teams managing Discourse forums need to manually check the platform throughout the day to spot new member topics that require attention, which is time-consuming and risks missing urgent posts. This workflow monitors a Discourse community on an hourly schedule, automatically filters out team-authored posts and announcements, and sends only new, member-created topics to Slack as a consolidated digest. It respects configured business hours and batches overnight activity into the first morning update, so teams can triage and respond quickly without constant manual monitoring.
Solution and impact
The workflow eliminates manual forum checking by delivering a filtered, actionable digest of new member topics directly to Slack every hour during business hours. Teams save time, reduce response delays, and ensure no community post falls through the cracks, while overnight topics are neatly summarized in the first morning update for efficient triaging.