We are always watching…the Postman community forum
Our Postman community is the best. The Postman staff has a bunch of different ways to talk with our users – Twitter, GitHub, email, etc. We also wanted a way for Postman users to talk to each other, and help each other out, when they had questions.
We had been using Slack for some time, and we love using it in the Postman office. For our community, Slack was great for giving people quick answers, but conversations were often interwoven and repetitive. It also became difficult to have longer, more complex, discussions.
We needed a different solution for our community.
Moving the conversation to a forum seemed like a great idea. It would make it easier for Postman users to sift through previously answered questions and to have longer conversations around APIs. This would also be accessible for people just getting started with Postman, and give us more insight into what they wanted and needed.
If you haven’t visited the Postman community forum yet, check it out!
Keeping tabs on Discourse with Postman monitoring
Although our organization is very active, we wanted to do our best to monitor the Help and Just getting started categories during the transition from Slack, and what better way to do that than using Postman?
Discourse has an API, and golly gee willikers, do we love APIs. We already monitor our GitHub issues. Similarly, we wanted to leverage our Postman monitoring to alert us when one of these important posts slips through the cracks unanswered.
Here’s what the workflow looks like:
Try it yourself
If you manage a Discourse forum, or if you’re part of a community that you want to keep up with, click the orange Run in Postman button to import the sample collection and environment template into your Postman app. Check out the collection documentation for step-by-step instructions to get started.
Before you can run the collection or monitor locally, you’ll need to update a few of the environment variables in the environment template provided.
| Environment Variable Name | Description |
discourseForumUrl |
The URL to the Discourse forum you’d like to monitor. Ours is https://community.getpostman.com. |
apiKey |
This value will need to be generated by a forum Administrator. See Discourse API documentation for more information.
Note that the Discourse API requires an |
webhook |
A Slack webhook URL |
What are you waiting for? Head on over to the Postman Discourse forum, log in with your Postman account, and post!
Hey Chris,
Appreciate..!!
Thanks for sharing such an amazing post about Postman.
Thanks for postman