This is a work in progress that intended to be an open-source, self-hosted platform that lets you host multiple forums.
Each forum has two sections, a discussion section and a calendar. In the discussion section, content can be upvoted so that the best content rises to the top. In the event section, anyone can post an event that participants in the community may be interested in.
Events can be submitted to multiple forums to increase visibility of them and help promote them. The same can be done with text-based discussion posts.
To solve the problem where you're bored on the weekend but you don't know what to do in your area, events can be searched across multiple forums based on location, tags and keyword. Screenshots are below.
When the project is finished, I will add documentation so that anyone can deploy their own Multiforum with custom branding.
The below screenshots capture the state of the project as of January 2024. The layout is responsive with both desktop and mobile views.
Here's how it looks if you filter all in-person events by 'next weekend.' If today is during the week of Monday, June 17, then the events are filtered to show events on Saturday the 22nd and Sunday the 23rd:
If you mouse over an event list item or map marker, an info window pops up on the map and the list item is also highlighted. This is supposed to make it easier to draw a connection between the two:
Here's another example showing what happens if you hover over an event in the map view:
If I'm only interested in events from a few specific forums, I filter the map by those forums:
Note: The above component for selecting forums is unwieldy and I'll be replacing it with something more compact.
The resulting event list is now filtered by the two forums I selected - the writers group and the birdwatching one. All of the concerts are no longer in the list and their map markers are no longer on the map:
If you're looking at events from the map view, and you click on one, the details will show up in a drawer:
In that drawer you can see what forums that event was submitted to. If you click the forum name it will take you to the event page in the context of that forum:
Screenshots of event detail pages within a forum are below.
Some map markers indicate that there are multiple events at the same location. If you click that, you can see the list of events that are taking place there at different times:
Here's another example of how it looks when you click on a location with multiple events. In this case, the events are both at the same concert venue, Crescent Ballroom:
If you click on an event list item or map marker for a single event, the details of that event show in a drawer (the drawer also contains permanent links to the event's detail page, useful for sharing event details):
Each forum can have its own list of upcoming events. In this example, a forum about rock music in Phoenix is promoting events at multiple venues. Meanwhile, the forum sidebar shows the handful of events which are coming up the soonest, so that they are visible even when the Discussions tab is active:
In this particular example, hypothetically, the venues may host a variety of events in multiple musical genres but these particular ones would be of interest to people who like rock music. So in that way, the forum can be used as a way to organize public information about events and promote them to the people who find them most relevant.
(The screenshots may not show the best examples. Morphia Slow categorizes herself as "Folk-Murder-Pop", but you get the idea.)
Events can be filtered within a forum. This screenshot shows how it looks when events in "Phoenix Bird Lovers" are filtered to show only events next weekend:
Here are the events filtered by location. In this case they are filtered to show events within 10 miles of Tempe:
A birdwatching forum is an example of a forum that could make use of both in-person events and online discussions with people who may never attend any events. For example, someone who takes a picture of an unfamiliar bird in Phoenix might ask the Phoenix birdwatchers what it is. That's when the Discussions tab within a forum would come in handy:
If you click an item in the discussion list, it goes to the discussion detail view, which contains the comments. In the case of a birdwatching group, maybe there's a comment identifying the bird:
Events are optional for forums. I intend to make it possible for a forum to turn off the events tab. The Discussions tab is the main landing page, especially for forums that could be focused on technical questions and answers, which would have no need for events:
You can share an event to one or more forums. In a typical use case, you would link to an official event page with the full details and information about how to buy tickets, if applicable.
Submitting an event to multiple forums is a good way to increase the visibility of the event. This one will now be visible in the context of both of the selected forums:
If you add an address, the event will be discoverable from the sitewide event search page (the map view):
If you click the menu button on the top left of any page, it shows recently visited forums to support easy context switching.
Here's the discussion list within a single forum, at mobile width:
Here's another example of a discussion list view at mobile width:
Here's the list of events within a specific forum:
This screenshot shows how an event detail page looks at mobile width, if you come to it from within the context of an individual forum:
This screenshot shows how a discussion detail page looks at mobile width, if you come to it from within the context of an individual forum:
Here's the sitewide in-person event list with an active filter, shown here at mobile width. All the same filtering features work at mobile width as well. Here, the events are filtered by the birdwatching forum, so not all of the map markers are displayed.
Here is the list of forums at mobile width:
The list of forums can be filtered by tag:
The forum list can be filtered by search terms as well:
On the backend (https://github.com/gennit-project/multiforum-backend), an Apollo server fetches data from the database (a graph database, Neo4j). Some resolvers are auto-generated using the Neo4j graphql library, while more complex resolvers are implemented using a combination of the OGM and custom Cypher queries.
The frontend is a Vue application that makes GraphQL queries to the Apollo server.
I will fill out this section when the project is finished, or if someone expresses interest in collaborating on this project, whichever comes sooner. Anyone interested can contact me at [email protected].
Integration tests are in the cypress directory and cover all the create, read, update and delete operations on forums, events, discussions and comments, as well as the filtering in the list views.
I'm currently working on what I feel is the boring part of the project - permissions, roles and content moderation features.
After that, some of the next-up features are:
- Clean up the component for forum filtering and make it work more like autocomplete.
- Add the multiforum feature (which is what the app is named after), which is a group of forums. Filtering by a multiforum will show content from all forums in that group.
- The ability for OP to mark a comment as the best answer to their question.
- The ability to manage recurring events and easily clone a past event to make a new one.
- Search in the top nav.
- The ability to 'super upvote' a post or comment if you write something nice on the author's public scratchpad... or tip them.
- Bundled notifications.
- The ability to put downloadable files in a discussion post - useful for sharing video game mods and the like.
- The ability to gate some of the above downloadable files behind a paywall and other monetization features.