Postminder

Postminder is for beeminding your posts to a Discourse forum. This forum software is the basis of a lot of online fora, including Beeminder's. You could consider this a Beeminder Forum integration primarily!

In reality it's just a pretty wrapper around the RSSminder integration, to make it a bit more accessible to the average person. We've discussed the whys and wherefores of adding this on the blog!

What can I beemind with Postminder?

New posts and comments made in a forum! This could be the Beeminder forum, or other fora that run on the Discourse software, which underpins a lot of the modern fora out there. They're all white-labelled, so they won't say "Discourse" on them, but they have a similar look, so you can probably recognise them if you use more than one.

Once your goal is set up, each time you post to the forum you're tracking, that's +1 for your goal!

Postminder sample goal setup

  1. Head to create a new goal (also accessible through the New Goal link in the top menu).
  2. Click the Postminder icon to start a new goal that picks up posts from a Discourse forum:

    Postminder: the Discourse icon of a stylised speech bubble
  3. First you need to grab the URL of the forum you want to track. In the case of Beeminder, that's at https://forum.beeminder.com/

    Once you've added the URL, type your username in the next box.

    If you'd like to create a Beeminder goal to track posts to the Beeminder forum, don't forget that your username on the forum can be different from your Beeminder username, so you can check it if you're not sure by going to the forum, clicking on your profile image in the top right, and selecting the person icon in the dropdown to go to your profile.

    Beeminder + Discourse: The first box requests your forum URL, and the second box is for your username! Type or paste them both in before you hit "Check"
    Click "Check" to continue. If the name you gave isn't already a valid forum user, an error banner will pop up at the top of the page saying "Error while fetching feed."
  4. If all is well, the goal creation wizard will expand to give you some more options. Choose your rate here to decide how many posts you want to make: if you want to make one post per week, for example, you would set the rate to 1/7 per day.

    Screenshot of the goal setup wizard, where you can see how many posts have been added in the last week, set up your rate, and choose your initial safety buffer


    Lastly, if you want to delay your goal's start a few days (maybe you're traveling this weekend), be sure to tick the Start this goal with extra leeway box. Enter the number of days you want to delay and press Continue.
  5. Give your goal a brief name. If you want, you can also write a short description with more information.

    "Give your goal a name", followed by two text entry boxes. The first allows you to enter a short slug which will name your goal and create a URL for it. The second textbox allows you to set a short description, and is optional.
  6. Finally, choose your initial pledge. This is the amount you will pay the first time you derail on the goal. After derailing, the pledge will increase by default — use the dropdown below to control how high it goes by selecting the cap. In the example below, I have chosen to start at a $5 pledge, which will increase each time I derail, until it reaches $270 — the pledge cap. (To read more about pledges and payments, check out some FAQs!)

    If you want to start out with a sort of trial period, you can choose to start the goal at $0. If you do that, the pledge will automatically increase to $5 after seven days. If you derail before that, it will also increase to $5.

    Screenshot of the "Starting Stakes" screen. The text says "Your pledge will increase each time you derail until you reach your pledge cap (which you can adjust below)", with a demonstration below showing the pledge progression: 5, 10, 30, 90... to the pledge cap, which currently shows $270. Below, a checkbox button allows you to choose to "Hold the pledge at $0 for 7 days while I get my feet wet"
  7. Step through the confirmation scenes and check the preview of your goal. If all sounds good, then that's it!

    A screenshot of shanaqui's "postminder" goal, showing +1 due in four days


Keywords: autodata integrations, blog, feed, RSS, discourse fora

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us