Christina Gorton

Posted on Oct 26, 2021

Share your Forem!

#forem #selfhost #foremcloud

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

What are you working on?

It’s that time again. Let’s share the communities you have created with Forem!

In the previous “What are you working on?” post we had several great communities shared.

Have you created a Forem community yet?

Has the community you shared before grown?

Let’s celebrate all we have accomplished so far and help each other continue to grow our communities.

Questions the community might want to know about:

What is your Forem? Can you share a link or is it still private?
If you self-host, did you have trouble setting up your Forem? Can you give advice to anyone else looking to self-host?
What are you looking to achieve with Forem?
What is not working with your current solution?
What are your current favorite Forem features?
What do you feel is missing from your Forem that would help engage your community?
If you've used the Forem Admin Docs, did you find everything you needed?

Share as much as you like in the comments below.

Top comments (14)

Ben Halpern • Oct 26 '21

DEV

Lee • Oct 27 '21

Keep at it Ben, I am sure this Forem will take off eventually. 🙃

Christina Gorton • Oct 27 '21

🤪

Lee • Oct 27 '21

I saw 'share this' to Dev on codepen today. I know it's been there a while but wow, imagine seeing that appear for your forem.

Christina Gorton • Oct 27 '21

Oh! I never noticed the "Share on Dev" button before.

Lee • Oct 27 '21 • Edited

This MMA Life
FlowState
The Elastic Guru
MetaPunk

These are all the things I am interested in and I learn better through community.
I just like connecting with likeminded peeps away from all the centralised unfriendly poorly moderated socials.
I have been a member of Dev for yonks and wanted to kick start communities with the same values.
I believe in Forem and it's leadership team as a force of light and goodness on the Interwebs.

Muhammed Cetin • Oct 27 '21 • Edited

Moreover, I'll create more Forems (about 15 - 18) in 3 months.

Posandu • Oct 27 '21

Be careful, using Windows in your domain is against Microsoft's trademark.

Muhammed Cetin • Oct 27 '21

Thanks, Tronic247,

I already have some Windows 10 tutorial banks and communities containing "Windows" in their domain names for about 5 years. Microsoft is a kind company against its supporters and community builders.

Lee • Oct 27 '21

Wow, 15-18! That's some going.. you'll have a forem empire!

Muhammed Cetin • Oct 27 '21

Forem is an awesome platform for community builders, I think. So, I'll do my best with it.

Akhil Naidu • Oct 27 '21

Here are some active Forems, that I manage for others.

Leewardslope
Sharply
Edu Forem
Bass Guitar
mmo4me

My hobby was to selfhost various opensource projects on my free time, and Forem is one among those. If you are new to Forem, I'll try my best to solve your techical issues so that you can host your own Forem.

9comindia • Oct 28 '21

Hi,

What is your Forem? Can you share a link or is it still private? logicrace.com

If you self-host, did you have trouble setting up your Forem? Can you give advice to anyone else looking to self-host?

Building from the source code and troubleshooting the issues took me over a year (on and off) while the self-host method took around a week including the time to create accounts on AWS and GCP.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem? I am trying to build a community of Telugu people.

What is not working with your current solution? Few important ones are:

The non-technical people are expecting a login method with mobile number and OTP, and are not comfortable even with the email signup method. The lengthy signup process is turning off many people; setting the password twice at signup, clicking on "confirm account link" in the email, again entering email and password to login is lengthy for many of them.

Suggested way for somewhat user-friendly email signup:
We can leave the password thing out, signup with user ID and email, send a simple 4 digit OTP to the email and user submitting that OTP should confirm the user's account and should signin to the account automatically.
No need for the reset password as well, anytime the user needs to re-login, OTP should be sent to the email id and entering that OTP should log the user in.

Liquid tags to embed youtube videos is excellent for me, but people are finding it very difficult to understand the format. All our competitor apps are providing the "share" option to directly share from youtube and embed the video automatically in the app.
Once we flag a user, didn't find the option to unflag after the user apologizes.

What are your current favorite Forem features? All the features are excellent, the recent "Feed Latest Top" tabs reorganization is simple change but very effective.

What do you feel is missing from your Forem that would help engage your community?

I don't know how was the deprecated Voting feature in Forem or Dev.to. But observing that a simple anonymous voting feature is very effectively engaging the Indian users on other upcoming social apps.

The most engaging functionality is like "Any user can post a question with multiple options and the other users can choose one of the options anonymously, the users can see the poll result till that point of time only after choosing any option, and once voted.. the users can change their option but can not undo their participation in that voting."

It would be great if we can have this Voting functionality back on Forem.

If you've used the Forem Admin Docs, did you find everything you needed?

For self-host method.. almost yes. Remember like going into some trouble finding Butane for Ubuntu and then installing Fedora Linux just for Butane.