I'm creating a discussion community that way people can talk politics, arts, financial matters Etc.
i want to know if i can achieve this with FOREM before i use start the setup.
1- Can users make and moderate their own categories or communities?
2- Can users subscribe for specific categories or communities and let the feed of home page shows only the feed from these categories or communities?
3- Can FOREM monetized by google adsense or any other 3rd party network?
4- Can i show a widget for trending posts or communities?
5- Does FOREM support RTL and arabic language?
Top comments (5)
Hey Alex! Seriously great questions here. 😀
Users can create tags and admin can select which tags are supported (more easily discovered on the platform). Admin can also recruit tag moderators who have the ability to add/remove the tags they are mods for from posts. Tag mods can also set up rules & design for tags.
Users can subscribe to tags (categories), other users, organizations, and podcasts. The home feed will populate with different items depending upon what the user is subscribed to.
We're not looking to add Google Adsense at this time. As noted in this comment by our founder @ben, we're not interested in adopting any third party ad networks which bring privacy or UX concerns with them and we don't ever plan to support Adsense unless privacy and UX concerns are thoroughly accounted for.
As a Forem admin, you can control which tags are posted in the righthand sidebar on the homepage of your Forem. Also, /tags shows a list of tags from most- to least-used — you could create navigation link on the homepage that points to this page. We also have a feature request in, so that this page will only feature supported tags. This way, Forem admin can have more control over this page and point to it as a place that shows users the most popular content. As for pointing to specific posts, you can pin a post on the homepage feed so that it appears up top in the feed for everyone. This way you can point people to a specific post if you want to. The homepage feed also lets you filter to "top" which is meant to show you the most trending posts in a given week/month/year/infinity, e.g. forem.dev/top/week.
Forem doesn't support RTL out of the box, though we hope to add this down the line. Here's where someone else requested this on forem.dev and you can see the related discussion on GitHub. I know this is in high demand and something we hope to be able to provide in the future; we're just not there yet. Note: someone forked Forem and has been working on this some here - ddos.dev/. Their code can be found here - github.com/ddos-devs/forem. Just wanted to let you know about this in case you wish to contact them.
As Michael said, there is a version of "yes" to most of these right now, and there is active development in going deeper in most of this.
We're working on enhanced role concepts which will lead to the creation of more private areas to complement the public tag areas, which can already all be moderated on an individual basis.
On the ad network front, the answer is that we will seek to enable no track ads. So ads on a Forem could be managed by a third party ad network, but not the right up to the cookie/fingerprint layer. I.e. by interacting with our display ad API, we will be able to enable third party ad networks, but they won't have the capacity to impact performance or insert tracking scripts.
We don't over-use the display ads on DEV, but the underlying principles of how they self-optimize are pretty powerful and will continue evolve, all with no tracking capabilities.
@ben by having such a hard-and-fast stance on advertising, I think Forem is inadvertently restricting user growth, adoption, and the success of individual forem instances.
Why not let the individual forem creators decide which ad networks they want to use?
Advertising is used by literally every media site, and becomes even more important when you have solo-founders who need to generate revenues to pay for the costs of running their Forems.
Thank you michael and ben for the detailed answers.
also, as muhammed mention and to be honest with you my friends, i'm not a big fan of tracking, in fact i stand against this, but its the only way to keep our community going.
in middle-east sponsorship and donation culture is not that big as western world.
in other word i safely can say, that most of the internet users are selfish, they come to your website, read, write and take what they want and leave with no appreciation even if they can give something small, so this is the fact of web communities in middle-east (arab countries), if you don`t have a guaranteed revenue stream, then your project is dead.
Especially the 3rd one is strongly needed because most Forem owners need to make money to feed and develop their community. I think the easiest way to do that is being an Adsense publisher. Everybody cannot find a sponsor without the help of a network.
I have already implemented Google Adsense on my Forem by hardcoded as you can see here Windows11.DEV. However, all Forem self-hosters cannot do that due to a lack of coding knowledge.