What are you working on? Share your Forem!

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

My Forem is community.promoso.io - Promoso is a side project that I've been working on.

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

The only issue that I encountered was during the Digital Ocean setup part(step 4) where I had to run doctl auth init - my issue was that I had a previous account already auth'd and I had to "reset" the accounts.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?

I'm looking to build a community/self-help platform for users of my product.

What is not working with your current solution?

Without Forem, I wouldn't have a community platform!

How do you plan to use your Forem?

I plan on investing time into quality posts and fostering a place of growth.

What are your current favorite Forem features?

With a few minor customizations, Forem is ready out of the box. It took me only around 15 - 20 minutes to get everything situated for users to sign up and start exploring!

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

As Christina mentioned, a more feature rich editor would be nice for less technical users!

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

I am currently working on a Forem to discuss all things Visual Studio Code. I've been running a Twitter handle, @vscodetips, for the past few years and decided to create a community for it.

VS Code Tips

@vscodetips

Well, looks like we’re going to create a VS Code Tips community using @forem!

Stay tuned… twitter.com/vscodetips/sta…

14:29 PM - 02 Jun 2021

VS Code Tips @vscodetips

Question for all of our followers. Would you be interested in a VS @code Tips community? The Twitter account would remain as is.

The site is live, but I'm still configuring community.vscodetips.com

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

I deployed to Digital Ocean and followed the self-hosting instructions. I had some issues, but they were mainly me lol. Since I work at Forem, some stuff I ran into, I fixed in the selfhost repository.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?

I really want this to be an amazing community about Visual Studio Code, my favourite editor. Where folks share extensions or themes they've created, tips, keyboard shortcuts etc. All the things!

What is not working with your current solution?

Currently I only use Twitter, which has been working well, but it restricts what you can do in the community.

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

I'll get back to you about that one. 😎

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

gggames.visualcosita.com

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

I self hosted on Digitalocean. It worked pretty effortlessly out of the box on an M1 laptop. I'm just used to mention the M1 compatibility because there are some tools and things that still aren't fully compatible.

Only tricky thing I managed to mess up was the DNS (it had to be DNS). I'm using a subdomain so I was supposed to use forem_domain_name: visualcosita.com and forem_subdomain_name: gggames, but didn't. I skimmed through that section too quickly I had forem_domain_name: gggames.visualcosita.com and I was getting a connection error. The error was SSL related, because the DNS records didn't match what Forem was using.

Fixed my mistake in the YAML, re-ran the playbook and worked great.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?

I'm playing around, while also a core dev 😄 But the motivation behind the name/purpose of the Forem is:

Some of the "bucket list projects" of mine involve implementing/producing an indie game (or a few) one day. I'd love to add a community aspect to them too, and I think Forem offers so much potential for this. There's a lot of features a developer can leverage, and it's all Open Source. This is just a place to share thoughts of my own in this topic, while also thinking about how the game will actually work and come to life.

This is my first short message in the Forem

What is not working with your current solution?

I don't have a game coded and I won't be working on it in the near future 😆

For now I'll just use the GGGames Forem to share ideas every now and then about what GGGames will hopefully one day become a reality. All while also working on Forem features themselves. Pretty exciting stuff IMO.

How do you plan to use your Forem?

Elevator pitch: A mobile app that has a 2d game where quests and/or progress in general is deeply intertwined with the community of people playing. Kind of like guilds or clans organize themselves and can connect in the Forem. Both the game itself and the entire community (Forem) experience would live in that one mobile app. Forem provides enough extensibility for all of this to work.

I won't be working on the game itself anytime soon, but I really like the big picture possibilities. I’ll just try to share thoughts about the project every now and then over there 😄

Answers to some of the questions:
What is your Forem? Can you share a link or is it still private?
I am currently working on a Forem to share Linux knowledge for beginners. I will be learning Linux over the next few months and want a community to share with and learn from.

The url is still currently private but after I add a few posts I will make it publicly available.

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

I was one of the first people not on our systems team to test out Forem self-host so I definitely had some trouble 😅 I have now set up Forems on AWS, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud. My current Forem is on DigitalOcean.
I created some guides to help others setting up their Forems.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?
I want a community where people feel safe to learn from and grow with others if they are on a similar journey to learn Linux as I am.

What is not working with your current solution?
Usually I share posts like this on DEV or other platforms but I wanted dedicated space to capture all of my learnings and give the opportunity for others to share as well.

What do you feel is missing from your Forem that would help engage your community?
I know we have talked internally about a more feature rich editor. I'd love to provide an editing experience for my community that doesn't rely on markdown. I know this is something other communities would like as well.

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

I am currently building out 1vibe.com which is a community for passionate hip-hop fans. It's still early days, we have a few more things to set up, but you are welcome to join us!

If you self-host, did you have trouble setting up your Forem?

I am not self-hosting 1VIBE, it is a Forem Cloud setup. I do plan to experiment and learn how to deploy Forem communities on DigitalOcean.

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?

Using the awesome tools/features that Forem offers, I am hoping to provide a space that inspires collaboration and creative expression. The long term goal is for 1VIBE to become a popular destination for hip-hop culture, an alternative to reddit.com/r/hiphopheads.

What is not working with your current solution?

Before moving to Forem, 1VIBE was a wordpress website. We functioned mainly as a content aggregator with additional orignal content produced by our team. Although the site did well in terms of attaining organic traffic via search engines like Google, it was missing the ability to have discussions and foster a community around the content itself.

How do you plan to use your Forem?

Forem will now be where/how we host everything we do with 1VIBE. I do have plans to build a stand alone mobile app strictly for music videos, an idea inspired by Neverthink + ForeignRap, but maybe there is a way to work this idea within Forem itself.

What are your current favorite Forem features?

Forem has many awesome features, but these are some of my favs: Forem Connect, podcasts, iOS app, browser exctension, ability to create post series, supported tags, tag submission templates + comment templates, badges, profile preview cards, create/join organizations, and the new analytics dashboard.

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

I think a feature rich editor will be very helpful for my community. Markdown can be intimidating for many, especially those who have never used it before.

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

I just recently launched Synthusiasts Club for synthesizer enthusiasts. It's a public community, please join up! 😀

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

It's been a bit since I originally went through the installation process (and I definitely had lots of help!) but I remember struggling with step #11 "Once DNS is pointed at your Forem VM, you will need to restart the Forem Traefik service (sudo systemctl restart forem-traefik.service) via SSH on your Forem server to generate a TLS cert."

It turned out that there was a section in my Digital Ocean droplet networking config where they had setup a firewall entry restricting port 22 traffic (which SSH uses) to a specific IP address. Once we set it to “All IPv4”, it worked like a charm. You can find the link on the “Networking” heading for the droplet. Props to @jamie for helping me figure this one out. 🙌

What are you looking to achieve with Forem?

I'm just hoping to meet some other cool folks who like synthesizers. It's nice to hang out with other folks who have a similar passion and maybe they can teach me a thing or two! I'm a guitarist/singer that bought a few synths over COVID and I'm still trying to make synths of everything. Oh yeah and I'm also going to use my community to hit people with as many dorky puns and wordplay as possible, hence synthusiasts.

What is not working with your current solution?

Everything is working! I don't think I've set up email SMTP yet though, but I know the docs are up to date here and I just need to follow through.

How do you plan to use your Forem?

For starters, I think I need to get going with writing more especially if I'm going to be able to pull in other folks to the community.

I don't blog enough on my own and I know that it's a great way to learn about a subject.

I chose to launch a community around synthesizers because I'm learning about them a lot right now and think this would be a great way to organize my thoughts. I'm also just digesting a lot of info out there that's been created by other folks... I think it'd be cool to reach out to these people and see if they'd be down to join the community.

What are your current favorite Forem features?

Hmmm... that's a great question.

I really like liquid tags! I think they greatly expand the capabilities of the editor and as a YouTube fan, I'm regularly embedding YouTube videos into my posts.

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

I'd really like it if we could lean more into multimedia content — video and podcasts. We do have these available, but I'd like to see them become more feature rich.

For one, I think it'd be cool if we could open up podcast management to users. Right now, they submit a podcast and it kind of disappears behind scenes. I think it'd be great if users could submit podcasts more freely and customize the look and feel of their podcast landing page without admin needing to assist.

I also realize that DEV has a videos section but we've not been able to open this up to other Forems because it's not in it's final state. I'd really love it if we could work on this more!

Hi, I still cannot fully launch the project for a number of reasons:

• No Russian language support
• Urls do not work with Russian (Need сonverts Cyrillic slugs to Latin characters)
• No migration scripts from wordpress and discourse to forem

My forem

Here is my forem.
Easy UI

Just went live with this work-in-progress

lets.garden/

@coffeecraftcode are you still planning on doing a creative/creators forem?