Looked in this forum and on GitHub Discourse for an official Discourse Model Context Protocol (MCP) and did not find anything.
While there are unofficial Discourse MCP (ref), would much prefer an official one. Yes I am considering creating my own if needed.
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Update:
DeepLearning.AI just released a free online class taught by Elie Schoppik from Anthropic
My current thinking roadmap wise is is along this… still needs lots of refinement but it helps paint a picture of how I think about this.
Allow admin to select a collection of tools (either custom or built-in) and publish to a particular endpoint. /discourse-ai/mcp/NAME
Use Bearer for authentication - in particular a user API key
Key can be scoped to a particular MCP service
Milestone
Allow admin to consume an MCP service, which adds a list of tools to the available tool list that can then be consumed by personas.
Use Bearer for authentication
Milestone
Milestone
This is a more complex auth mechanism especially registration
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milestone
leaving this here as a possible way of modularizing it , glad to see a conversation on this topic.https://smithery.ai/
Hi everyone,
Just jumping in to say that we currently operate as an MCP client via ravenala.ai, and we’ve seen some of our users start to integrate Discourse through Zapier-based workflows.
We're especially excited by the potential of a native MCP server, and would love to know if there’s a rough ETA for V0 or any experimental endpoint we might start testing with. Even a simple /discourse-ai/mcp/NAME setup with basic tools (search/read topics, fetch posts) would open up some great async automation use cases.
Happy to share specific feedback and lightweight ideas if helpful—looking forward to seeing how this evolves!
I started working on an mcp here:
https://github.com/SamSaffron/discourse-mcp
Once I make a bunch more progress we can publish it and make it easy to use.
I am curious, what do y'all expect the MCP to do?
I have the obvious ones of search/read, what are some other specific use cases you are hoping we nail here?
The timing is splendid. I’m working on creating a sort of open source cognitive system to interact with Discourse instances which runs as a daemon with multiple modules. So being able to create topics as well would be dandy although tricky I’m sure. Also, running data explorer queries would allow for enriching context/data quite a lot.
I started building this system using Discourse’s REST API but now I might just wait until the MCP is ready then use the API for very niche tasks.
sam:
I am curious, what do y’all expect the MCP to do?
As you noted you have search and the ability to read specific topics, posts, users and tags which covers most of what is needed.
sam:what are some other specific use cases you are hoping we nail here?
Chat with forum information
One that is of great value is similar to the idea of using AI to read a PDF then chat with the PDF. Instead of the content coming from the PDF, the content is from the Discourse forum.
Now while there is Discourse AI, wrapping some of the read-only functionality with a common interface, e.g. MCP, and being able to access within a common MCP host, e.g. Claude, increases the usefulness.
Additionally with this ability, one could in the MCP host, e.g. Anthropic Claude, add other agents or sources of information that could be used with the information from the Discourse MCP.
Morning brief
On most days I visit over 20 different places for information, a few of them being Discourse forums and looking for specific information, or something of value that I was not specifically seeking. What would be nice is to get all of this automated and a Discourse MCP would be of value; yes I know not all Discourse sites would be required to allow access via an MCP.
MCP Discourse forum discriminator (AKA Relevance score)
As a programmer am a member of several Discourse forums related to software. If all of them have MCP servers and all of them are activated for use with an MCP host, and I ask a not so specific question about coding, e.g. giving a coding fragment, there needs to be a way for the MCP server to give feedback if this question is a good fit for that forum before requesting a more expensive request.
Yes this is an odd question, but we know that in reality this is a possible real world scenario.
Do not expect a solution right away but something to ponder.
Frequently asked question that are unanswered (AKA Lacuna)
Since the AI can quickly scan and summarize all topics into points in the vector space, it is possible for it to identify frequently asked questions that are not being answered. This is a common occurrence when something new is released such as with software updates, or even more real time when servers go down.
Additionally one could use the Discourse MCP to help a user identify commonalities in the information that could take minutes to hours to do so by hand.
From trying to help with server down issues this would be of great value, e.g. a server is working for me but not in another country, or it is working for me with Windows, but not with Apple phones, or there is a pattern of related problems but because users do not use the correct terminology it goes unanswered, e.g. CFG should be used but is not.
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For me personally, currently not looking for the ability to write or modify.
For our use case, we are actually looking for discourse-dev documentation MCP. That way, we want to make sure by abide by the latest dev standards and discourse specific rules to make small modifications to theme components (and maybe even plugins).
@sam
Would you prefer future suggestions posted
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Question:
I know some users would prefer not to have their post made available to an AI as they did not op in for this. I checked user preferences for this and did not find any.
Sorry if this turns into a heated topic or possibly change to the Discourse core code; better to resolve now rather than latter.
If this does turn into a discussion, please move to a new topic so others have an opportunity to see it.
EricGT:
as new reply to this topic
For now as I am moving quite fast this is probably a good approach, though I don’t mind if you maintain a list in the OP
EricGT:I know some users would prefer not to have their post made available to an AI as they did not op in for this. I checked user preferences for this and did not find any.
This is not a setting we have and really to me this is more of a decision of forum admins vs end users on the forum. Once info is public there is no protocol for “making content available to search engines / humans and no ai” so I would not even know where to start there.
Closing the loop here: MCP is out!
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-mcp-is-here/386983/1