API keys for the forum now open! 🔌

General CPCWiki related
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API Access for CPCWiki: Hook Your Scripts, Hardware, and Desktops into the Forum

I’ve been playing with the forum’s API system these past few days. Discourse offers an API that can fetch (and write, but I’ve not tested that side) data with a user’s account privileges.

As an example, I’ve built a TRMNL plugin that, paired with a script that runs on my unRAID homelab pulls and displays stats for the forum for me to admire on my fridge door:

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So, If you enjoy building custom tools, automating your dev workflow, or wiring odd hardware to the web, we are opening up personal API access for forum members.

Discourse does not have a self-service button in account settings to generate personal tokens, but I can issue a dedicated API key directly for your account if you request one. The key runs under your username with your exact account permissions. If you cannot see a private section in your browser, your API key cannot see it either. We can also restrict keys to specific scopes (such as read-only access or posting strictly to a single category) if you want an extra layer of safety for your scripts.

Here are a few practical ideas for what you can build with one (these are ideas I’ve mostly taken from others:

  • Z80 CI/CD Releases: Add a curl call to your assembler Makefile. make release can upload the .dsk straight to your project thread alongside an updated changelog.

  • E-Ink (and other) Desk Displays (TRMNL, Tidbyt): Have a secondary screen on your desk, fridge, front door or wherever else polling the forum to show unread PM counts, latest topics, or active threads.

  • Notifiers: plug one of the Wi-Fi solutions to your CPC and write a tool that fetches new thread titles and prints them directly to a GT65 (how cool would that be?).

  • Browser Extensions: Build an extension to track specific tags, monitor market listings, or alert you when someone mentions you or your project.

  • Launcher & Emulator Sync: Feed uploaded disk images from the forum straight into a local desktop launcher or emulator without manually downloading attachments through the web UI.

  • Chat Bridges: Pipe new announcements or technical discussions into your local IRC channel or whatever without HTML scraping.

If you have a project or an experiment in mind, send me a PM with a quick note on what you want to build and what scopes you need (for instance: read-only, reading notifications, or creating posts in specific sections). I will generate your key and send it over.

You can read the official documentation here.

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  • E-Ink (and other) Desk Displays (TRMNL, Tidbyt): Have a secondary screen on your desk, fridge, front door or wherever else polling the forum to show unread PM counts, latest topics, or active threads.

    That is the killer feature, much easier than to display the whole forum … love it.

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Yeah that’s a nice one, but non interactive sadly.

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Vibe Codeing will get you anything you want. APIs are just enabling to do whatever you want with the date. Vibe coding on the other half will implemt what you want on your Pico/Pi whatever iot device, without you need to know any of the details.

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I hope soon there will be a transfer of the old cpcwiki to the new one (along with the many thousands members), only then you will see… an EXPLOSION of the forum statistics! :wink:

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Well yes, but what does the API have to do with it? :slight_smile:

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Well, i guess i saw the analytics screenshot on the 1st post and respond to that :slight_smile:

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Ahhh ok :smiley: