We're moving to a new forum!

I am the first to admit that I don't follow this forum enough, even though it's clearly a great resource for community members. Part of that problem is that I just don't enjoy using it 🙂, the other part is that I find it too intricate to manage and maintain. The last issue is that because this is a hosted 3rd-party solution, I have absolutely no control over functions and features, nor workflow and integration with existing Grav infrastructure.

To tackle this i've been building a new native Grav forum product that is a more traditional style of forum (think phpbb like), with sections and categories instead of relying on tags alone. But it has rich capabilities including private messaging, polls, marking posts as 'solved', and it will be fully integrated into the new upcoming "GetgGrav.org" site redesign. I've already built some pretty snazzy stuff like "typing indicators", and 'live updates' so you get replies popping into the thread you are reading 'live' without refreshing.

This is a sneak peek at the progress so far... There will be much more progress and polish applied before it's live:

Have no fear though, i've already built and tested an importer from Discourse into my new "Forum Pro" product and it will import all the Discourse posts including attachments, users, PMs, etc. You will even be able to continue to use your existing username and password. Of course they will be some rough edges at first, so expect that, it's a new system after all. But please feel free to post issues that you find, and i'll get them sorted as quickly as possible.

If there are any forum-specific features that you find are missing, also let me know and i'll see if it's possible to get them implemented.

Cheers!

My main concern, as a moderator - will there be some spam handling? Here they use some AI, which does a pretty good job flagging spam and not showing the posts publicly until they're approved by mods. There's also an option to delete and ban the user immediately. I do maybe around 5 such reviews daily on average (there are spikes up to maybe 30 some days). So it would be great to have some automated spam protection too, which wouldn't block legit posts and flag spam for review

There's already a level of spam protection, but I think an ai-enhanced level of spam protection could be a useful feature. I'll also make sure we have a quick delete/ban function.

updated the images with latest progress...

btw, i have added two levels of AI-powered spam protection.. first on submission posts go through a local spam-specific AI model running on the server, it's small and fast and built for this.. it will identify more than the typical static spam protection (word identifier, link counting, etc). Also I've configured a more robust AI process that can happen daily to look through messages that been posted in teh past 24 hours and flag for review with a more in-depth AI analysis using an external model (think Haiku or similar). It offloads to AI-Pro for this.

I've also created quick review capabilities that allow you to jump through posts in the review queue, directly in their respective threads, as well as the quick delete/ban option you as a moderator can perform on any post or reply.