Forum for your association!
Nomagic is officially launching Forum-as-a-service! Forum is available on simple request for any not-for-profit organisation member.
We have selected the FOSS web application Flarum, a shiny and sleek Forum solution which has been developed actively for years. Many websites have been implementing it throughout the years. Though it was labelled beta for a long time (ie there could be breaking changes with the first stable release), it was already very stable.
In the world of Open Source forum solutions, Flarum represents an excellent alternative to Discourse. It also has the advantage that it is not solely distributed as a docker container (which we do not use on Nomagic).
Flarum community finally released the first stable version in May 2021, eleven years after the first stone was set.
Keeping the people you share a passion with you close…
Forums have been around the Web almost since the beginning. By bringing quick and direct interaction between people, forums boosted the adoption of the web for general users. Users created threads covering all kinds of topics, that various and relevant content would be indexed, crawled and found via a simple web search.
Forums could be found on all kind of topics. They could be public or private, used to share achievements or seek advice, for support, for complaints, to buy or sell all kind of things ,etc.
…while keeping Facebook at bay
Then Facebook came along, and once they got momentum, they looked for a way to keep people longer on their platform. Getting to know ever so more about their users (also known as people farming). Behold the Facebook groups:
Groups are a place to communicate about shared interests with certain people. You can create a group for anything – your family reunion, your after-work sports team or your book club.
Basically: Forums on Facebook, for Facebook users only. The advantage is the obvious reach and potential audience. The cost: contributing to a centralised, mortiferous Internet.
Ever heard of Anil Dash presentation on the web we lost 
?
Now, considering that search engines are still working and relevant, there is no reason not to offer a healthy place online to people sharing your passions and interests, is there?
What does it look like?
Flarum is a very sleek piece of software. Fully responsive, it allows logo and color customisations to hoist your forum to your colors!
Flarum is extremely modular. It comes with a simple core of features, which can be further completed by a wide range of plugins. It may be part of a strategy to attract developers/small companies, offering a variety of FOSS or proprietary modules in the future (like WordPres or Dolibarr).
Nomagic will deploy new forums with a bunch of pre-installed modules, but if you need additional modules you just need to ask.
How do I get one?
Forums are for not-for-profits mainly, as they are typically the kind of entity that could make good use of a forum. However if, as a Nomagic member, you want to have a safe place to invite a bunch of people to share a passion with, feel free to contact us via Matrix or email to request your own forum. Hopefully we will be happy to oblige!
The various project accounts pictures shown here are the property of their owners, please refer to the official applications’ websites to get more details on their licensing.
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