Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: Can these features done with FOREM?

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington • Edited

Hey Alex! Seriously great questions here. πŸ˜€

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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 β€” 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.

  5. 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.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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.

dev ad

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valuearb profile image
valuearb

@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.