Discuss non-nodes?

This is an interesting idea, and one that resonates with a desire I've had in the past. Typically I've tried to use the "rss items as nodes" approach, but this tends to not work well, and as you say, produces ridiculous numbers of nodes very quickly.

That said, my primary focus for the time being is on making this work for my current client. While it's possible this feature will be useful to them, I haven't heard anything about it yet. Bottom line: if there's an easy way to incorporate this idea (ie. you provide a patch, or I see an obvious/easy tweak), I'm definitely into it :)

Thanks,
Derek

I can totally sympathise with the "Sounds cool, patches welcome" feeling. :) I'd be willing to do the coding but, honestly, this is not something I'll get to in the near future so I'm marking it postponed. If you don't want it cluttering your queue, you can close it. When I get to a point in my to do list that I can take a good look at it, I'll let you know.

Thanks for considering it,

Michelle

Cool, no sweat- I'll leave it postponed but assign it to myself so I don't forget about it, and let you know if I notice an easy way to accomplish it :)

a fresh thought on this from a co-worker today: perhaps this feature could be accomplished in the same way that the "blog it" feature works from the blog.module.

the trick with integrating this into discussthis.module is that, because rss items are not proper nodes, tracking a mapping between items and the forum topics discussing them is somewhat different from just a simple nid -> nid relation. nonetheless, it may be a straightforward extension of the current logic to track what "type" of object is being discussed, a generic "id" for that object type, and the topic nid which corresponds to it.

also, it's not obvious how to select what forum these discussions would go into (except on a global level, which might be good enough), and we don't necessarily want the link to be displayed in the same way (which could just be dealt with at a theme level, I suppose)

FWIW, I just want to generate the forum post and am not concerned about maintaining a link back to the RSS item. Basically, the text of the RSS item (along with an attribution) would become the text of the forum post and the discussion would carry on from there. If there is a way to make sure anyone else trying to discuss the item goes to the already exising forum post instead of creating another, that would be great. But I don't need any more link than that for my purposes.

Thanks,

Michelle